Mixed Race Studies

Commentary: Debating Coloured Identity in the Western Cape

African Security Review
Volume 14, Number 4 (2005)
pages 118-119

Cheryl Hendricks, Senior Research Fellow
Security Sector Governance Programme
Institute of Security Studies, (Tshwane) Pretoria

The nature and form of coloured identity in the Western Cape has been vociferously debated. Coloured identity became a particular concern after the 1994 general elections when the coloured vote returned the National Party to the Western Cape provincial government. More recently, a spate of incidents in the Western Cape have propelled the group into the national spotlight.
 
Many coloureds have indicated that they feel marginalised in the post-apartheid dispensation, and are especially resentful at what they perceive to be a preferential allocation of resources to Africans in the Western Cape, when their needs are just as great. These tensions were highlighted when a group of coloureds protested against the relocation of Africans, whose informal housing had been destroyed in a fire, to a hostel in the coloured township of Bokmakkierie…

…The typical response has been to debate coloured identity. The underlying assumption is that there is something fundamentally wrong with this identity and that some ideological transformation of the bearers of the identity will resolve the problems. This type of response draws on the dominant discourse that has portrayed that identity as bureaucratically constructed and therefore deviant. The onus is then placed on coloureds to change. This is a limited response that forecloses debate on the identity, does not grapple with the larger context of identity constructions in South Africa, and does not adequately address the issues that generate conflict in the Western Cape.
 
We cannot have a meaningful discussion on coloured identity in isolation from other identities that shape its expression. When discussing the identity we need to take into account conceptual issues (Whom are we speaking about?), discursive issues (How has the identity been constructed? By whom? In which contexts?), and perceived power relations in South Africa…

…Who are the coloureds?

Coloureds are often identified as South Africans who are of mixed race. Since everyone is of mixed race (as there is no such thing as a pure race), the identity is ipso facto meaningless (but then so are all other racial identities presumed on the basis of authenticity or purity). However, we do not dismiss these identities because they have social meaning and material consequences. Coloureds are descendants of the sexual liaisons between colonialists, slaves and the indigenous Khoisan. This ‘mixing’ took place centuries ago and state-enforced self-reproduction has largely been the means through which the group multiplied.

However, coloureds are not simply the offspring of inter-racial liaisons. And, conversely, children of ‘mixed marriages’ do not automatically lay claim to a coloured identity. This is a complex historically located identity that stems from the processes of slavery, genocide, rape and perceived miscegenation. The identity construction has been cloaked by the perceived shame of ‘illegitimacy’ and lack of authenticity that has to a large extent psychologically disempowered the bearers of the identity. For most of the history of this community, steeped in oppression and struggles for liberation, had been erased and/or silenced by successive regimes and the group members themselves…

Read the entire article here.

‘The rivers of Zimbabwe will run red with blood’: Enoch Powell and the Post-Imperial Nostalgia of the Monday Club

Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume 37, Issue 4 (December 2011)
pages 731-745
DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2011.613691

Daniel McNeil, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
Newcastle University, United Kingdom

In his influential account of post-colonial melancholia, Paul Gilroy suggests that contemporary reports of violence in Southern Africa reveal Britain’s inability to work through its grim history of imperialism and colonialism. Gilroy’s study links recent discussions of tragic Southern African themes to Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968. However, it does not mention Powell’s critique of Britain’s ‘post-imperial nostalgia’ in a speech about Rhodesia later that year. This is not entirely surprising – the Conservative Central Office did not disseminate Powell’s call for Britons to move beyond sentimental attachment to ‘kith and kin’ in Rhodesia, and Rhodesian sympathisers in the Conservative Monday Club attempted to work around Powell’s refusal to support the ‘White Commonwealth’. Moreover, Powell opposed non-white ‘communalism’ whether he was emphasising the importance of the British Empire to English identity or challenging the ‘harmful myth’ of empire as an English nationalist. Consequently, this article uses archival material relating to the Monday Club and the Rhodesian Ministry of Information in order to document three of the main strands of post-colonial melancholia that apply to Powellite figures on the right who defended (white) minority rule in Rhodesia and/or demonised (non-white) minority cultures in the United Kingdom. The first main strand of post-colonial melancholia involves the belief that racial intermixture will lead to violence and economic instability. The second emphasises the importance of strong white rule to limit racial violence and industrial retardation. The third attempts to contest and then seize the position of victim, alleging one set of standards for the ‘civilised’ West and another set of standards for ‘failed, incompetent and pre-modern states.’

Read or purchase the article here.

Lectures delivered by John Powell under the auspices of the lectureship in Music

The Rice Institute Pamphlet
Volume 10, Number 3 (July 1923)
pages 107-163

Lectures delivered by John Powell
Palace Theatre of Houston
1923-04-05 through 1923-04-06

John Powell

Table of Contents

• I. Music and the Individual (20 pages)
• II. Music and the Nation (38 pages)

From “Music and the Nation”

This is America, a large country. We are the hope of the world. We stand for and safeguard the liberty of the world. We are the greatest country that ever existed or ever will exist. People of every race and clime have come to our shores, The white, the yellow, the red, the black, and the brown are all here in this great melting-pot. They are all free and equal in the brotherhood of man. Eventually they will fuse into a homogeneous mass, and the outcome of this amalgamation will be the highest type of humanity ever known in history—because this is America.

Nobody has more respect for America nor more pride in her than I myself. But it seems to me that the folly of this idea surpasses anything that has ever come within my knowledge. It is idiocy to suppose that mere contact with American soil can change age-old hereditary characters; that, because this is America, the action of ineluctable, biological laws will be suspended. The melting-pot should rather be termed the “witches’ cauldron.” And we can be well assured that no miraculous alchemy will transmute these tainted strains into the perfect superman. Indeed, nothing more preposterous than this theory has ever been preached to a long-suffering people. Why, we would not think of subjecting even our domestic animals to such conditions as these! Everyone knows that if he wishes to breed thorough-bred horses he cannot admix inferior breeds into the stock. The same applies to flowers, to garden vegetables. How dare we sit still and let happen to our children-bone of our bone, blood of our blood-that which we would not allow to happen to the very beasts of the field. I wish here and now to enter my protest against this insidious, this hideous doctrine with every drop of blood in my veins and every ounce of vigor in my body.

If there were no other reason for rejecting this solution of general miscegenation, the negro problem would furnish good and sufficient grounds. If the present ratio were to remain permanent, the inevitable product of the melting-pot would be approximately an octoroon. It should not be necessary to stress the significance of this point. We know that under the Mendelian law the African strain is hereditarily predominant. In other words, one drop of negro blood makes the negro. We also know that no higher race has ever beqn able to preserve its culture, to prevent decay and eventual degeneracy when tainted, even slightly, with negro blood. Sixty centuries of history establish this rule. Since the first page of recorded fact, history can show no exception. Were the American people to become an octoroon race, it would mean their sinking to the level of Haiti and Santo Domingo.

With the constant interchange of population between Europe and America, Europe would likewise inevitably become tainted. This would mean the degeneration of the whole Caucasian race, the annihilation of white civilization. For not only are the physical characteristics of the negro predominant, but the universal experience of the past, as well as the study of our own hybrids and the other negroid peoples of the present time, proves conclusively that his psychology is also hereditarily predominant. This is the reason why every race which has mixed blood with him has decayed. If we, in America, allow this contamination to proceed unchecked, our civilization is inexorably doomed, For the transmission of these characters is effected through the germ plasm; and, whether we accept or discard the more extreme deductions of Weismann, we must still admit that the poison is too deeply embedded to be eradicable by education, or by material, social, or political advantages. Once let our germ plasm become tainted, and all is irrevocably lost. For, granting that natural selection and the course of evolution might eventually produce from this contaminated mass a race of high order, even then aæons would have to elapse before any appreciable results could show themselves, and Anglo-Saxon civilization would long since have vanished eternally from the face of the earth. But if we reject this melting-pot solution, what is left to us?…

Read both papers here and here.

First Annual Convention Report: Black German Cultural Society NJ

Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey
German Historical Institute
Washington, D.C.
2011-08-19 through 2011-08-21
14 pages

By Priscilla Layne and S. Marina Jones

The First Annual Black German Cultural Society, NJ Convention was an important opportunity for scholars, students, and individuals personally affected by Afrogerman history and culture, from both sides of the Atlantic, to come together. Participants included numerous members of the Afrogerman community many of whom are themselves scholars, authors, filmmakers, and activists…

Read the entire report here.

The Multiracial Identity Movement: Countless Ways to Misunderstand Race

MixedRaceStudies.org
2011-11-04

Steven F. Riley

In Jen Chau’s essay, “Multiracial Families: Counted But Still Misunderstood,” in the October 31, 2011 issue of Racialiscious, reveals just how much race is misunderstood by some activists within the multiracial identity movement and exemplifies why the movement—in its current form—is incapable of leading us into a post-racial future.

Part of the “quiet” that Ms. Chau is experiencing is due to the realization that President Barack Obama is not the multiracial messiah some had thought he would be. He is neither a messiah, nor is he—as he has stated on multiple occasions—multiracial.  Unfortunately, in many ways, the policies of our first black President differ little from our previous white President (George W. Bush). Is this the “black-white mix” we were hoping for? Perhaps the quiet is the palatable disappointment in President Obama’s first three years office. What part of “race is a social construction” does she not understand?  As succinctly stated by Professor Richard Thompson Ford,

“Because race is a social category and not a biological or genetic one, Obama’s mixed parentage does not determine his race. Mixed parentage may influence one’s appearance, and a person whose appearance is racially ambiguous can influence how she is perceived. In such instances, race may be a question of personal affiliation to some extent. And mixed parentage may influence how one chooses to identify. But for the most part, society assigns us our races. At any rate, Obama’s appearance is not ambiguous, and he unquestionably identifies as black.” (Emphasis is mine.)

A good first step would be to for activists respect Obama’s identity as they would like us to respect theirs.

My theory—which differs considerably from Ms. Chau’s—is that the “quiet” is due to fact that multiracial-identity movement is simply not the progressive force she and others think it is; and we—including activists themselves—are beginning to recognize that.  In many ways, the multiracial-identity movement mimics the tactics, ideologies and demagogueries of the right-wing conservative adherents that it claims to fight.

The problems with the movement are numerous, but they can be narrowed to three major issues: 1) Race as biology, 2) Ahistoricity, and 3) the refusal to discuss the role of white supremacy within the discourses of multiraciality.

After nearly a century of scientific acknowledgment that there is no such thing as “race” as a biological concept, why do some in the movement still pursue issues dealing with so-called “multiracial medicine?”  A truly progressive movement would preface all of its statements with the fact that “race” in short, was a concept used to justify the extermination and enslavement of non-Europeans.

Another deficiency in the multiracial movement is its unwillingness to acknowledge that so-called “racial mixing” in the Americas is a five-century—not four decade—aspect of our history.  Thus even if “race” were a biological concept, we are all most certainly “mixed” by now.  Rather than making hypocritical (demanding the freedom to self-identify for some but not for others) pronouncements on President Obama’s heterogeneous background, multiracial activists should also consider the heterogeneity of the First Lady Michelle Obama, the overwhelming vast majority of black and Latino Americans, and yes, a significant segment of white Americans. In 1927, 40 years before the mythological baby-boom that was allegedly brought about by Loving v. Virginia and just seven years after the last 20th-century census that would enumerate “mixed-race” people (Ms. Chau seems to have forgotten the seven past censuses starting in 1850 that counted mixed-race individuals), anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, revealed that,

“The word “Negro” is, biologically, a misnomer, for the African Negroes, brought to the United States as slaves, have crossed in breeding with the dominant White population, as well as with the aboriginal American Indian types with whom they came into contact, so that there is today only a small percentage of the American Negroes who may be considered Negro in the ordinary sense of the term.” (The emphasis is mine.)

When an early 20th-century anthropologist—in the midst of an overtly racist era—can show more insight that 21st century activists—in the midst of the so-called “Age of Obama” era—we have a serious problem.

Lastly, the most deafening “quiet” within the multiracial movement, is its silence on the role of white supremacy in the continuing oppression and shaping of identities here in United States and around the world.  It is the ideology of white supremacy that created the notion of race as biology, then racialized and dehumanized, enlslaved, and exterminated people around the world for centuries—and continue to do—to preserve the current Eurocentric hegemonic paradigm.  As Professor G. Reginald Daniel has warned,

“We should be especially concerned about any half-hearted attack on the Eurocentric paradigm in the manner of interracial colorism that merely weakens rather than eradicates the dichotomization of blackness and whiteness, while leaving intact the racial hierarchy that maintains white privilege.”

The type of incidents that agitate the multiracial identity movement today are not the growing wealth disparities among racialized groups, or current vigorous attempts to curtail voting rights of minorities ahead of the 2012 General Election, but rather the freely chosen racial identity by the President or the chosen racial identity of the child of a Hollywood celebrity.  As Ms. Chau has stated, there are many ways that we have to fight racism and ignorance, yet the movement—particularly on the internet—is more interested in exploiting the bodies of young people by hosting “mixed-race” fashion shows that conjure-up images of Quadroon Balls from the early 19th-century or posting photographs of the allegedly “multiracial person of-the-day” in a self-aggrandizing exercise that Professor Rainier Spencer has coined as “miscentrism.”  At this rate, the multiracial-identity movement will be no more effective in combating racism and ignorance than a lukewarm decaffeinated soy-triple-shot no-fat latte at Starbucks.

The Black-and-White World of Walter Ashby Plecker

The Virginian-Pilot
2004-08-18

Warren Fiske

Lacy Branham Hearl closes her eyes and travels eight decades back to what began as a sweet childhood.

There was family everywhere: her parents, five siblings, nine sets of adoring aunts and uncles and more cousins than she could count. They all lived in a Monacan Indian settlement near Amherst, their threadbare homes circling apple orchards at the foot of Tobacco Row Mountain.

As Hearl grew, however, she sensed the adults were engulfed in deepening despair. When she was 12, an uncle gathered his family and left Virginia, never to see her again. Other relatives scattered in rapid succession, some muttering the name “Plecker.”

Soon, only Hearl’s immediate family remained. Then the orchards began to close because there were not enough workers and the townspeople turned their backs and all that was left was prejudice and plight and Plecker.

Hearl shakes her head sadly.

“I thought Plecker was a devil,” she says. “Still do.”

Walter Ashby Plecker was the first registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, which records births, marriages and deaths. He accepted the job in 1912. For the next 34 years, he led the effort to purify the white race in Virginia by forcing Indians and other nonwhites to classify themselves as blacks. It amounted to bureaucratic genocide…

…From the grave, Plecker is frustrating the efforts of Virginia tribes to win federal recognition and a trove of accompanying grants for housing, health care and education. One of the requirements is that the tribes prove their continuous existence since 1900. Plecker, by purging Indians as a race, has made that nearly impossible. Six Virginia tribes are seeking the permission of Congress to bypass the requirement.

“It never seems to end with this guy,” said Kenneth Adams, chief of the Upper Mattaponi. “You wonder how anyone could be so consumed with hate.”..

…Plecker’s first 12 years on the job were groundbreaking and marked by goodwill. He educated midwives of all races on modern birthing techniques and cut the 5 percent death rate for black mothers almost in half. He developed an incubator – a combination of a laundry basket, dirt, a thermometer and a kerosene lamp – that anyone could make in an instant. Concerned by a high incidence of syphilitic blindness in black and Indian babies, he distributed silver nitrate to be put in the eyes of newborns…

…Plecker saw everything in black and white. There were no other races. There was no such thing as a Virginia Indian. The tribes, he said, had become a “mongrel” mixture of black and American Indian blood.

Their existence greatly disturbed Plecker. He was convinced that mulatto offspring would slowly seep into the white race. “Like rats when you’re not watching,” they “have been sneaking in their birth certificates through their own midwives, giving either Indian or white racial classification,” Plecker wrote.

He called them “the breach in the dike.” They had to be stopped.

Many who came into Plecker’s cross hairs were acting with pure intentions. They registered as white or Indian because that’s how their parents identified themselves. Plecker seemed to delight in informing them they were “colored,” citing genealogical records dating back to the early 1800s that he said his office possessed. His tone was cold and final.

In one letter, Plecker informed a Pennsylvania woman that the Virginia man about to become her son-in-law had black blood. “You have to set the thing straight now and we hope your daughter can see the seriousness of the whole matter and dismiss this young man without any more ado,” he wrote.

In another missive, he rejected a Lynchburg woman’s claim that her newborn was white. The father, he told her in a letter, had traces of “negro” blood.

“This is to inform you that this is a mulatto child and you cannot pass it off as white,” he wrote.

“You will have to do something about this matter and see that this child is not allowed to mix with white children. It cannot go to white schools and can never marry a white person in Virginia.

“It is a horrible thing.”…

…Plecker’s racial records were largely ignored after 1959, when his handpicked successor retired. Virginia schools were fully integrated in 1963 and, four years later, the state’s ban on interracial marriage was ruled unconstitutional. In 1975, the General Assembly repealed the rest of the Racial Integrity Act…

Read the entire article here.

White Supremacists from 1920s Still Thwarting Virginia Tribes

Indian Country Today Media Network
2011-04-26

Tanya Lee

Congress is once again considering legislation that would grant federal recognition to six of Virginia’s 11 state-recognized American Indian tribes—the Chickahominy, Chickahominy Eastern Division, Nansemond, Rappahannock and Upper Mattaponi tribes and the Monacan Indian Nation. Chief Gene Adkins of the Eastern Chickahominy Tribe said, “We have been working on federal recognition for about 10 years. It is hard for me to understand why it has not gone through like we hoped.”

Virginia Democrat Rep. Jim Moran, sponsor of the House bill that would recognize the tribes, said he introduced the legislation to correct a “travesty of justice. The Virginia Indian tribes have been treated as unjustly as any tribe in the country, and that’s saying a lot. These are the tribes that helped the first English settlers in North America survive. Of all the tribes, they should have been recognized.”

There are three routes to federal recognition—administrative, judicial and legislative, explained Wayne Adkins, president of the Virginia Indian Tribal Alliance for Life and second assistant chief of the Chickahominy Tribe. “The administrative route is very expensive. It’s a long process. Tribes gather documents, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) reviews them and tells tribes what other documents they need, then it’s get in line behind all the other tribes seeking recognition. It could take 30 years and cost $1 million per tribe. Most tribes going for recognition just don’t have that kind of money.”

Walter Ashby Plecker, said Wayne Adkins, is another big reason why going through the BIA process would be difficult for the Virginia tribes. “When Native Americans were given the right to vote [in 1924], Virginia adopted racially hostile laws,” Moran explained. The laws targeted blacks—and, by a quirk of logic—American Indians. Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was one of the most restrictive in the nation, but it was not the only one—30 states passed similar legislation.

Plecker, registrar of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912-1946, was instrumental in crafting that state’s law. He argued that there were no full-blooded Indians left in the state by the early 20th century; therefore, all who claimed Indian heritage were part something else, and he decided the best thing to do would be to lump them in with blacks, since, by his mandate as registrar, a person could claim only one of two racial backgrounds in Virginia: Caucasian or “Negro.” People claiming to be Indians, Plecker said, were r­eally blacks trying to move their families into a position where they could “pass,” or claim to be Caucasian.

Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 outlawed miscegenation, and its intent, quite simply, was to keep Anglo-Saxon blood pure. Wrote Plecker: “For the purpose of this act, the term ‘white person’ shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.… The [terms] ‘Mixed,’ ‘Issue,’ and perhaps one or two others, will be understood to mean a mixture of white and black r­aces, with the white predominating. That is the class that should be reported with the greatest care, as many of these are on the borderline, and constitute the real danger of race intermixture.”…

…Though Social Darwinism and eugenics originated in England, their real champions at the beginning of the 20th century were Americans. Plecker was a zealous eugenicist, advocating both a­nti-miscegenation laws and sterilization of the “unfit,” while also proselytizing that Caucasians and non-Caucasians should be kept separated. As part of his work in the Virginia Statistics Office, he eradicated records of Indian births and marriages in order to support his directive that all Indians were to be categorized as blacks. These are the very records that Virginia’s Indian tribes now need in order to receive federal recognition. Other records of tribal significance were destroyed in fires….

Read the entire article here.

There are Italians with black skin

Africa News
2010-05-28

Stephen Ogongo

Interview with Sabrina Jacobucci, President of Association of Afro-Italian Children

To be black and Italian at the same time is a new reality the Italian society is still struggling to accept.  Adoption and increase in the number of mixed marriages between Italians and Africans are gradually leading to an increase in the number of Black Italian children, the so-called Afro-Italians.  But the Italian society seems unprepared to cater for the social and educational needs of these children.  In this exclusive interview with Africa News, Ms. Sabrina Jacobucci, aka Flora NW, President of the Association of Afro-Italian Children, reveals the reasons that led to the foundation of the Association, the problems mixed heritage children face in the country, and suggests what should be done to make the education system more responsive to the needs of mixed heritage children.

Sabrina, please share with us the story behind the formation of the Association of Afro-Italian Children.

The Association was initiated by an Italian mother of two mixed-race children born abroad, who, when returning to Italy, started to express the need of meeting other black children since they were the only black children in school, in their block, whenever they went to the park or to after school activities. They started to ask: why aren’t there children like us on TV or on advertisements?  The Italian mother started to look for a group where children could meet other black children, but could only find associations of various migrant communities, or churches which catered for the Nigerian, or the Congolese or the Ghanaian and so forth.  The children could not, though, identify with any ethnic or migrant community in particular, being black Italians. So to answer the children’s need to see themselves represented, this woman started to look for other parents of black or mixed-race children to set up a group where the kids could, at least once a month, meet and feel stronger, in a society where to be black is often neither appreciated nor valued.

When was it founded?

A couple of years ago.

Who was involved?

I, the white Italian mum of Black Italian daughters (who also share an English, Nigerian and Jamaican mixed parentage), had the idea of setting up a group where my children could meet other Afro-Italian children. I thought gathering other parents of black children willing to meet would be easy.

Unfortunately, the number of black and mixed-race children is very low in Rome, especially in my area. So I started to “advertise” on the web, first of all on www.insenegal.org, a site which has a rich forum where a number of mothers of children having a Senegalese father write. But most of them weren’t from Rome. So I wrote to other parents’ forum, but they were attended mostly by parents of white children. And then, on one of these forums, I met the adoptive mum of a girl of Nigerian parentage, who shared the same need as mine. We were then joined by other adoptive and biological parents of black and mixed-race children, thanks to the website I manage http://afroitaliani.splinder.com, where I announce our meetings and other activities…

…From your experience, in Italy, are mixed heritage children facing different problems from those of other children?

Mixed race children often face the same issues black mono-heritage children face. No matter their skin tone, they are seen as black and therefore it is healthier and more empowering for them to identify as such, without denying their dual heritage at the same time. A racist is not going to ask them whether they are mixed-race. And yes, black and mixed race children definitely face different problems from those of white children…

…Do you think the education system in Italy fully caters for the needs of mixed heritage children?

I don’t think so. I don’t think the education system has even started to consider or understand the needs of mixed heritage children or of black children for that matter. They are invisible to the system because they are not even seen as a group. Also, mixed heritage is a concept that encompasses too broad a category. Our experience is that of parents of mixed-race children, black/white, and as such they face the same problems of institutional racism embedded in the education system black “mono-heritage” children face. I think that to separate mixed-race children from the black children amounts to “fractioning” the black community, and at this moment, when the community needs unity and strength, is not advisable…

Read the entire interview here.

Multiracial Politics or the Politics of being Multiracial?: Racial Theory, Civic Engagement, and Socio-political Participation in a Contemporary Society

University of Southern California
August 2010
376 pages

Jungmiwha Suk Bullock

A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

This dissertation examines the impacts of historical and contemporary racial theories, socio-political movements, and grassroots mobilization efforts of community-based organizations in transforming the politics to define multiracial identity and the “two or more races” population in the United States. Using an interdisciplinary and mixed methods research approach, I investigate the shifting and contested ways the multiracial population is defined in public and private discourses, paying particular attention to the complexities this community raises within and among monoracial identified communities. Examining the multiracial population in the U.S. has a significant and critical place in the larger trajectory of social scientific scholarship on race, gender, class, and other intersecting identities. This body of research counters the argument that multiple identity formation is inconsequential to theory, civic engagement, and socio-political participation in a contemporary society. This study urges scholars to (re)examine how race and ethnicity continues to be framed, analyzed, interrogated, and understood in ways that are restricted by historically racist/racialized moments that still linger today. These moments, I argue, are sharpened and more pronounced when centering the politics of what it means to claim a multiracial identity in America in the twenty-first century.

Three primary research questions examined in this study are: 1) How do we define the multiracial population in the United States and what do these definitions offer about racial and ethnic ideologies and the future for public policy post-Census 2000?; 2) What critical insights can centering the experiences of multiracial Americans and the efforts to define them on the local, state, and/or national levels (publicly and privately), offer for other groups in American society?; and 3) Under what conditions is it possible to politically mobilize around this shifting and contested category and what are the unmet needs of this emerging population?

The theoretical model for this study was Grounded Theory. Principle data collection methods were the “insider-outsider” and case study research approaches using extensive face-to-face audio and/or photographed interviews; participant and field observations of key local, state, and national events, including U.S. Census proceedings and California Senate Judiciary hearings; and content analysis of primary and secondary documents, including media coverage and organizational archives. Data was collected between 2004 and 2009 in Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, New York, and Sacramento. These cities exhibited the most heightened multiracial activity across the country in this timeframe. I also investigated exclusive, never before documented, behind the scenes initiatives to recognize the unmet needs of this emerging population through an in-depth case study of the Association of MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA)—one of the oldest leading national advocacy organizations for multiracial, multiethnic, and transracially adopted individuals, families, organizations, and allies.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Abstract
• Introduction/Chapter 1: Multiracial Politics or the Politics of Being Multiracial?: The Challenge of Racial Biology and Hegemonoracial Ideology in a Contemporary Society
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 2: The Multi-Whos?: Unpacking the Historical Discourseon Defining the Multiracial Population in the United States Census and in Social Science Research, 1850 to 2000
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 3: Simultaneous Identities: Comparative Interviews Among a Diverse Combination of Multiracial Experiences
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 4: From Manasseh to AMEA: A Case Study of Multiracial Community Building and Grassroots Activism through the Association of MultiEthnic Americans
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 5: Civically Engaging Identities: Keys to Effective Mobilization Toward Building a Collective Multiracial Community
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 6/Conclusion: Beyond the Politics of Being Multiracial: Toward a Revised Theoretical and Pragmatic Approach to Multiracial Presence in the U.S.
  • Endnotes
• Bibliography

List of Tables

1. Racial Designations to Classify Multiracial Identity on U.S. Census Enumeration Schedules (1850 to 2000)
2. Racial Designations to Classify Multiracial Identity on U.S. Census Enumeration Schedules (1850 to 2000) and a Historical Trajectory of Racial and Ethnic Theories in the United States
3. Participants Reported Self-Identification
4. Self-Reported Descriptions Given By Participants on Where Primarily Raised
5. Timeline of the Formation of Multiracial Organizations by Decade

List of Figures

1. Multiracial Births in California, 1997
2. Population Projection Excluding Multiracial Identity in California
3. Intersectionality Diagram
4. Intersectionality + Race/Ethnicity/Culture/Nationality Diagram
5. Multiracial Identity + Intersectionality Flowchart Diagram
6. Multi/Monoracial Identity + Intesectionality Venn Diagram
7. Flowchart of “Mulatto” Identity Formation as Depicted by Michael Davenport in “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics” (1911)
8. AMEA Organizational Structure
9. Multiracial Complexity Web of Identity/ies

Read the entire dissertation here.

Mixed Britannia: Part 3 of 3 (1965-2011)

BBC Two
2011-10-20

George Alagiah, Host

Below is the last episode as four 15-minute videos.