Mixed Race Studies

Race on the Menu: Cheerios, Paula Deen, with Some Supreme Court for Dessert

brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between
2012-06-26

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

It’s been a bad month. For some reason incidents and issues of race seems to appear like death, in groups of three. They clump together, overwhelming those whom they hurt and they come too quickly for others to process…

…But I am becoming less convinced that we will be able to have rational conversations about the facts of the cases, about how race functions in our society, what the consequences for our ignorance are for people of color. We cannot have these conversations because I am not sure we have really grappled with the reality of our condition as American citizens. We do not see ourselves as we really are. While some imagine themselves as the white wife and others as the black husband, what we fail to understand is that we are all the mixed race child. Regardless of our race we are children of this interracial union called America. We are the progeny of a tragic, dark, difficult history that we bear in our skin, even while we exhibit many wonderful possibilities.

But we will never move forward until we can admit who we are…

Read the entire article here.

Southern Race Question

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Tuesday, 1893-07-25
page 2, column 5
Source: Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Collection
Transcribed by Steven F. Riley

The Views Expressed in a Richmond Religious Newspaper

How the Negro Is Taking Advantage of the Opportunities for Advancement—Some Singular Ideas as to the Future Outcome of Present Developments — Another Talker Suggests a Colored State.

Richmond, Va., July 25—A startling editorial appeared in the last issue of the Richmond Christian Advocate, the leading Methodist organ In the South, on the negro question, Written by Dr. J. J. Lafferty. Among other things it said:

“A Southern Methodist advocate has this incident: In a village of the cotton belt a big, burly blackr ode up to a store and said to the owner: ‘Let this man (pointing to a poor white laborer) have two dollars’ worth of goods and charge it to me.’ This transaction may fret the reader, but it has a wide significance.”

“The Northern people, during the war, were drawn to the plantation peasantry of the South. The lot of fat and fun loving negro, the happiest working class on earth, was, for years, pictured as a bitter bondage, the slave was represented as longing for freedom, and during the war praying through the nights for the coming of the national troops. Those moving though mistaken fancies and much more of the same sort, stirred the philanthropic heart of the cotton thread millionaires, and the rich army contractors turned virtuous. A great sum was sent South for the education of the negro. It expenditure. In the main, helped the negro. It was wisely directed that these donations should have a practical turn. What was the outcome? We find in nearly every Southern state the negro boys of the brighter sort in training schools.”

“In the meanwhile, the negro reported in the census is growing rapidly as a citizen, with a home and decent income, a thrifty member of society. Moreover, the Southern commonwealth began after the war to tax the white property holders heavily to educate the sons of the non tax paying negro.”

“The negro laborer received as much money for coarse work as the ex-soldier of Lee. The white man consumed more of his earnings in house rent, clothing and food, hence he could not spare his son at the school. He needed the boy at the plow to aid in bringing up the family. The negro boy first loomed in the free school to read and write, then he learned in these technical schools how to make fine shoes, buggies, saddles, etc.”

“The newspapers recently reported that the private secretary to Mr. Blount of Georgia, representing the United States in the Hawaiian Islands, would shortly marry the daughter of a rich Chinaman of Honolulu. This educated young gentleman and of social standing seeks an alliance with an ex-coolie—a pig eyed pagan. Who will dare say that the olive colored octoroons and quadroons, the bright mulattoes, the heiresses of wealthy-men of mixed blood, will not be sought in the next century by impecunious, thriftless and idle young men of the white race? The negro maidens are seen at certain colleges for women of high degree in the North. Whereunto will this grow?”

“Consider the future of the friendless and fatherless boy of the white race in the South. Can he pay $500 to attend the Stevens Institute in New York. Can he command money for board and raiment while a student at any state school with a small annex of tools and a shop? He hasn’t money enough to buy oven a railroad ticket to such a college.”

“The grandchildren of warlike men with historic names, who made the Southern army a synonym of dauntless courage, are drifting toward the helot class, and in the century dawning there will come to pass social conditions that would stir the corpses in the jackets of grey.

“No man has soon the harvest from the sowing after Appomattox. The statesmen among us robbed the ex-soldier of Lee to educate black competitors of his children. Then Northern millionaires, in hatred of the paroled citizens, have endowed colleges of tools and machines to equip the ex-slave to surpass and subjugate the sons of the confederate in the struggle for the best pay and position in the skilled trades. It is a condition and not a theory that confronts us. Thoughtful men do not contest the fact.”

Madison, Wis., July 25—At the Monona lake assembly yesterday, John Temple Graves of Georgia advanced some radical ideas regarding the negro race problem in his lecture entitled, “Uncle Tom’s’ New Cabin.” He said:

“The remedy Is to be found in a negro state planted in the heart of our own great republic, under the shadow of the flag, under the benediction of the government. Here let him, unmolested, work out his final destiny. In the region of Colorado, Now Mexico and Arizona is to be found on area of 150,000,000 acres upon which our whole negro population could find subsistence and yet not be so densely populated as I found Germany or Belgium. The government should lend them every aid in developing the country. Negroes alone should hold the offices and rule the country. Nor are they opposed to such action. Actual investigation has shown that numbers are ready to go even to Africa where they can have a state of their own.”

Whites think race equality is nearer than blacks do, study finds

The Los Angeles Times
2013-08-22

Emily Alpert

Nearly half a century after Martin Luther King Jr. described his dream that someday people would be judged not by their race but by their character, whites think a colorblind society is much closer to reality than blacks, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center.

The findings underscore the enduring chasm between the way white and black Americans perceive racism and its continued effects, as glaring gaps in wealth and education persist between the races…

…Whites are more likely to believe that racial equality is within reach because “the hideous things that have happened in our history — lynchings, cross burnings, the Ku Klux Klan marching people out of town — those things have tended to disappear,” said Jerome Rabow, professor emeritus of sociology at UCLA. Whites also point to laws against discrimination, he said.

But “when blacks talk about how they’re doing, it’s more about their daily lives,” Rabow said. Whites often miss the daily frustrations that blacks encounter, such as frequently being pulled over by police, or professors assuming they’re meeting with them because they did poorly on an exam, Rabow added…

…Large majorities of black and white respondents said they believed that their two groups got along well, Pew found. Yet Pew discovered that for both whites and blacks, the feeling of racial progress that followed the election of Barack Obama seems to have faded.

After Obama became president, higher shares of both groups of respondents said blacks were doing better than they were five years earlier. Since then, the numbers have dropped closer to previous levels, back down to 35% of whites and 26% of blacks, the Pew survey showed.

“That Obama effect is quickly dissipating,” said Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, professor of sociology at Duke University. “Having a black president doesn’t mean much for us in daily life.”…

Read the entire article here.

Who is an Indian?: Race, Place, and the Politics of Indigeneity in the Americas

University of Toronto Press
August 2013
272 pages
Paper ISBN: 9780802095527
Cloth ISBN: 9780802098184

Edited by:

Maximilian C. Forte, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Who is an Indian? This is possibly the oldest question facing Indigenous peoples across the Americas, and one with significant implications for decisions relating to resource distribution, conflicts over who gets to live where and for how long, and clashing principles of governance and law. For centuries, the dominant views on this issue have been strongly shaped by ideas of both race and place. But just as important, who is permitted to ask, and answer this question?

This collection examines the changing roles of race and place in the politics of defining Indigenous identities in the Americas. Drawing on case studies of Indigenous communities across North America, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, it is a rare volume to compare Indigenous experience throughout the western hemisphere. The contributors question the vocabulary, legal mechanisms, and applications of science in constructing the identities of Indigenous populations, and consider ideas of nation, land, and tradition in moving indigeneity beyond race.

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction: “Who Is an Indian?” The Cultural Politics of a Bad Question / Maximilian C. Forte (Concordia University, Sociology and Anthropology)
• Chapter One: Inuitness and Territoriality in Canada / Donna Patrick (Carleton University, Sociology and Anthropology and the School of Canadian Studies)
• Chapter Two: Federally-Unrecognized Indigenous Communities in Canadian Contexts / Bonita Lawrence (York University, Equity Studies)
• Chapter Three: The Canary in the Coalmine: What Sociology Can Learn from Ethnic Identity Debates among American Indians / Eva Marie Garroutte (Boston College, Sociology) and C. Matthew Snipp (Stanford University, Sociology)
• Chapter Four : “This Sovereignty Thing”: Nationality, Blood, and the Cherokee Resurgence / Julia Coates (University of California Davis, Native American Studies)
• Chapter Five: Locating Identity: The Role of Place in Costa Rican Chorotega Identity / Karen Stocker (California State University, Anthropology)
• Chapter Six: Carib Identity, Racial Politics, and the Problem of Indigenous Recognition in Trinidad and Tobago / Maximilian C. Forte (Concordia University, Anthropology)
• Chapter Seven: Encountering Indigeneity: The International Funding of Indigeneity in Peru / José Antonio Lucero (University of Washington, The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies)
• Chapter Eight: The Color of Race: Indians and Progress in a Center-Left Brazil / Jonathan Warren (University of Washington, International Studies, Chair of Latin American Studies)
• Conclusion: Seeing Beyond the State and Thinking beyond the State of Sight / Maximilian C. Forte (Concordia University, Sociology and Anthropology)
• Contributors
• Index

Fix the Census’ Archaic Racial Categories

The New York Times
2013-08-21

Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs
Columbia University
Also former director of the U.S. Census Bureau from 1998 to 2001 and author of What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans (Princeton University Press, 2013)

Starting in 1790, and every 10 years since, the census has sorted the American population into distinct racial groups. Remarkably, a discredited relic of 18th-century science, the “five races of mankind,” lives on in the 21st century. Today, the census calls these five races white; black; American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.

The nation’s founders put a hierarchical racial classification to political use: its premise of white supremacy justified, among other things, enslaving Africans, violent removal of Native Americans from their land, the colonization of Caribbean and Pacific islands, Jim Crow subjugation and the importation of cheap labor from China and Mexico…

…Fast-growing population groups — mixed-race Americans, those with “hyphenated” identities, immigrants and their children, anyone under 30 — increasingly complain that the choices offered by the census are too limited, even ludicrous. Particularly tortured is the Census Bureau’s designation, since 1970, of “Hispanic” as an ethnicity or origin, thereby compelling Hispanics to also choose a “race.” In 2010, Hispanics were offered the option to select more than one race, but 37 percent opted for “some other race” — a telling indicator that the term itself is the problem.

Indeed, anyone who filled in “some other race” that year was allocated to one or more of the five main groupings. Many absurdities have resulted.

America has about 1.5 million immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa — some 3 percent of the nation’s black population. Like President Obama’s father, who was Kenyan, their experience differs vastly from that of African-Americans whose ancestors were enslaved, yet they are subsumed into the same category — one that, until this very year, continued to include the outdated term “Negro.”

The census considers Arabs white, along with non-Arabs like Turks and Kurds because they have origins in the Middle East or North Africa. Migrants from the former Soviet nations in Central Asia are lumped in as white along with descendants of New England pilgrims…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Scholar Saw a Multicolored American Culture

The New York Times
2013-08-19

Mel Watkins

Albert Murray Dies at 97; Fought Black Separatism

Albert Murray, an essayist, critic and novelist who influenced the national discussion about race by challenging black separatism, insisting that the black experience was essential to American culture and inextricably tied to it, died on Sunday at his home in Harlem. He was 97.

Lewis P. Jones, a family spokesman and executor of Mr. Murray’s estate, confirmed the death.

Mr. Murray was one of the last surviving links to a period of flowering creativity and spreading ferment among the black intelligentsia in postwar America, when the growing force of the civil rights movement gave rise to new bodies of thought about black identity, black political power and the prospects for equality in a society with a history of racism.

 As blacks and whites clashed in the streets, black integrationists and black nationalists dueled in the academy and in books and essays. And Mr. Murray was in the middle of the debate, along with writers and artists including James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Romare Bearden and his good friend Ralph Ellison.

One of his boldest challenges was directed toward a new black nationalist movement that was gathering force in the late 1960s, drawing support from the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, and finding advocates on university faculties and among alienated young blacks who believed that they could never achieve true equality in the United States.

 Mr. Murray insisted that integration was necessary, inescapable and the only path forward for the country. And to those — blacks and whites alike — who would have isolated “black culture” from the American mainstream, he answered that it couldn’t be done. To him the currents of the black experience — expressed in language and music and rooted in slavery — run through American culture, blending with European and American Indian traditions and helping to give the nation’s culture its very shape and sound…

…Mr. Murray established himself as a formidable social and literary figure in 1970 with his first book, a collection of essays titled “The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture.” The book constituted an attack on black separatism.

“The United States is not a nation of black and white people,” Mr. Murray wrote. “Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.” America, he maintained, “even in its most rigidly segregated precincts,” was a “nation of multicolored people,” or Omni-Americans: “part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian — and part Negro.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

There Is No Scientific Rationale for Race-Based Research

Journal of the National Medical Association
Volume 99, Number 6 (June 2007)
pages 690-692

Eddie L. Hoover, Professor of Surgery
State University of New York, Buffalo

For centuries, the colonial governments used a combination of race and ethnic characteristics to subjugate and control people of color, and scientists of the day provided evidence of the “natural order of things” to support national policies of domination, segregation and control. There have been many examples of events in the past 70 years to suggest that achievements by ethnic peoples are not genetically determined and that race and ethnicity are merely terms to describe external features, language, culture, social mores and folklore. BiDil was the first drug in this country approved by the FDA for use in a single “race” after a clinical trial that enrolled only members of that race. Thus arose the question of the efficacy of doing race-based research in humans. In order for this kind of research to have any scientific basis, each individually defined or self-declared race would have to have a 100% pure gene pool, and the data show that the gene pool among whites, blacks and Hispanics in America is very heterogeneous. This makes for far greater similarities among U.S. citizens than any perceived differences, and genomic science has failed to support the concept of racial categories in medicine.Scientists involved with the first mapping of the human genome have noted that there is no basis in the genetic code for race. That being the case, there appears to be no justification for race-based research among human beings.

Although the United States has experienced enormous improvements in its healthcare system over the past half-century, there are still widening disparities in most disease processes between whites and blacks/Hispanics.’ There has been much debate as to how these disparities can be eliminated, but simple, logical programs that could be tailored to specific minority communities in different geographical locations have not proven to be practical for a variety of reasons. To be sure, disparities in healthcare, like anything else, are a function of a variety of factors, including education, environment, income and culture, among others. Race and ethnicity are important determinants of some of these functions, thus raising the question as to whether these parameters may, in fact, be determinants of outcome in some of these disease processes based upon genetics as well as the aforementioned risk factors.

Modern-day science has amassed enough evidence to suggest that there is very little biological difference between the various races. In order for race-based research to have any scientific basis, each individually defined or self-declared race would have to have a 100% pure and homogeneous gene pool. Some racial and ethnic groups have a very heterogeneous gene pool, such as whites and Hispanics. The same scientific data show that approximately 80% of American blacks have some degree of white ancestry, and although not so nearly well publicized is the fact that many whites also have black and Hispanic ancestry. This would make for far greater similarities in the U.S. black/white gene pool than any perceived differences, and genomic science has failed to support the concept of racial categories in medicine and further purports that there is more genetic diversity within a “racial cohort” than any differences between two such cohorts.” Craig Venter, who helped produce the first map of the human genome, noted that there is no basis in the genetic code for race.’ That being the case, race then becomes rather meaningless in scientific research. This would obviously include race-based pharmaceutical research that resulted in the drug BiDil. This is not to be confused with the fact that race indeed affects both access and outcomes in our healthcare system, as it most certainly does. Even black medical professionals do not enjoy the same access to highly specialized services as their white counterparts, such as coronary artery bypass grafting, but the basis is not biological and by extension, not genetically determined…

Read the entire article here.

Obama rodeo clown incident illustrates nation’s continued racial divide

The Washington Post
2013-08-15

Philip Rucker

SEDALIA, Mo. — As some people at the Missouri State Fair see it, the rodeo incident last weekend in which a ringleader taunted a clown wearing a mask of President Obama and played with his lips as a bull charged after him was neither racist nor disrespectful.

It was a joke, they said, overblown by a news media that’s hypersensitive to any possible slight against the nation’s first black president. They said the hooting and hollering from the crowd that night was because of a fundamental dislike of the president.

“I’ve got no respect for him,” said Virgil Henke, 65, a livestock farmer who explained his distaste for Obama with several falsehoods about his background: “Why, he’s destroyed this country. How much freedom have we lost? I don’t care whether it’s a black man in office, but we have to have a true-blooded American. I think he is Muslim and trying to destroy the country, catering to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.”…

…There is a long history of mocking politicians at rodeos, and clowns have donned masks of other presidents as part of their acts. But James Staab, a political science professor at the University of Central Missouri, said last week’s incident “goes beyond the pale — they’re talking about physical injury and racial stereotypes.”…

…“I was raised to think the blacks were bad; I’m not gonna lie. We lived on one side of the tracks, and they lived on the other,” said Margaret Abercrombie, 68, who is white and grew up along the Mississippi River in Sikeston, Mo.

Abercrombie said she voted twice for Obama but didn’t find anything wrong with the rodeo act. As she rode her motorized wheelchair to the grandstands at the rodeo arena, which on this day hosted tractor pull races, Abercrombie said the anti-Obama sentiments she encounters are based on race.

“You hear the farmers here, they just don’t like him because he’s black,” Abercrombie said. Pointing across the fairgrounds to the cattle barns, she added, “I’m surprised they ain’t got a cow over there named Obama.”…

Read the entire article here.

A big fish or a small pond? Framing effects in percentages

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Volume 122, Issue 2, November 2013
pages 190–199
DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2013.07.003

Meng Li, Assistant Professor
Department of Health and Behavioral Sciences
University of Colorado Denver

Gretchen B. Chapman, Professor of Psychology
Rutgers University

This paper presents three studies that demonstrate people’s preference for a large percentage of a small subset over a small percentage of a large subset, when the net overall quantity is equated. Because the division of a set into subsets is often arbitrary, this preference represents a framing effect. The framing effect is particularly pronounced for large percentages. We propose that the effect has two causes: A partial neglect of the subset information, and a non-linear shaped function in the way people perceive percentages.

Highlights

• We examined framing effects in percentages.
• We explored the functional form of percentage weighting.
• Big percentage of a small subset looms larger than small percentage of a big subset.
• Such effect occurs are more pronounced for percentages greater than 50%.
• The perception of percentages follows a non-linear function.

Read or purchase the article here.

De Blasio Takes His Modern Family on the Campaign Trail

The New York Times
2013-08-07

Michael Barbaro

As his S.U.V. sped down the West Side Highway a few days ago, 30 minutes late to a campaign stop, Bill de Blasio, a Democratic mayoral candidate, proposed a simple solution: let his wife do the talking instead of him.

“Is Chirlane there?” he asked an aide, as he began placing a call on his cellphone to his wife. “I already warned her she should be prepared to speak.”

For the next five minutes, Mr. de Blasio, the public advocate, and his wife, Chirlane McCray, traded talking points while she prepared to address an angry crowd of hospital workers in Brooklyn.

It was a small but telling glimpse into a candidacy that, to a remarkable degree, has thrust family into a starring role — in campaign literature and debate preparation sessions, at political rallies and at subway meet-and-greets…

…In a city where white residents are becoming a minority of the voting population, the family-centric strategy has allowed Mr. de Blasio, who is Italian-American, to portray himself as a paragon of modern, middle-class, multicultural New York: Ms. McCray is black and the couple has two children, Dante and Chiara, 18…

…In the most powerful moment of the new ad, Mr. de Blasio’s son takes aim at Mr. Bloomberg’s reliance on police stops and searches, which have had an outsize impact on young black men. Looking into the camera, Dante de Blasio promises that his father will be the “only one who will end an era of stop-and-frisk that unfairly targets people of color.”…

Read the entire article here.