Mixed Race Studies

White or Black? Conservatives, Liberals See Faces Differently

Pacific Standard
Santa Barbara, California
2013-06-05

Tom Jacobs, Staff Writer

New research finds people on the political right are quicker to classify a racially ambiguous face as black.

Did you notice that mixed-race gentleman who passed you on the sidewalk yesterday? During the split second as he walked by, did he register in your mind as black or white?

Disturbing new research suggests the answer to that question may depend on your political ideology.

In three experiments, “we found that conservatives were more likely than liberals to categorize a racially ambiguous person as black than white,” a research team led by New York University psychologist Amy Krosch writes in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Intriguingly, this dynamic disappeared when the study participants—white Americans—were told they were judging Canadian faces. The tendency for those on the right to more quickly categorize someone as “black” only occurred when they were evaluating their fellow countrymen…

Read the entire article here.

Ethnic minorities: defining ethnicity and race

The Scottish Public Health Observatory
Ethnic Minorities
Last Updated: 2012-03-06

Ethnicity

Ethnicity has been defined as:

“the social group a person belongs to, and either identifies with or is identified with by others, as a result of a mix of cultural and other factors including language, diet, religion, ancestry and physical features traditionally associated with race”. (1)

Ethnicity is essentially self-defined and may change over time. Classification of ethnicity is essentially pragmatic, based on categories that include common self-descriptions, are acceptable to respondents and that identify variations that are important for research or policy. There is increasing recognition that people may want to identify themselves with more than one ethnic group, and the “mixed” category introduced in the UK 2001 Census attempts to do this. The standard classification of ethnic group in the UK is that used in the 2011 Census (which was slightly different in each of the four countries of the UK). Ethnicity is different from country of origin, since many countries include more than one ethnic group.

Race

The concept of race is controversial. It is difficult to define a rationale for racial categories and there is no consistent agreement about an objective set of categories. Classifying individuals by their physical appearance and skin colour is unreliable and of questionable validity. Genetic studies have found some evidence of broad “continental” groups which are genetically similar.(2,3) However, there is little evidence that these correspond to commonly perceived racial categories.(4) There is wider genetic variation between individuals within one “racial” group (such as “white”) than there is between such “racial” groups (5)—indeed 93% to 95% of genetic variation is within population groups. Despite these difficulties, the term race is still widely used in legal and policy contexts…

Read the entire article here.

Pacific Islanders: a Misclassified People

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2013-06-03

Kawika Riley, Chief Executive and Founder
Pacific Islander Access Project
also adjunct lecturer at George Washington University

Imagine that you’re a parent, teacher, or counselor who helped a promising student apply for financial aid. She’s an underrepresented minority, so you encouraged her to apply to several scholarships for minority students. A few weeks later, she receives a wave of responses from them, all saying the same thing: She’s not eligible to apply. Why? Because the colleges have misclassified her; even though she’s an underrepresented minority student, they’ve decided to treat her as if she’s not.

Now imagine that instead of one student’s being misclassified, this is happening to every student who belongs to one of the fastest-growing minority groups in America. Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders don’t need to imagine any of this. This is their reality.

For more than 20 years, U.S. Census data have shown that Pacific Islanders are far less likely to graduate from college than is the general population. The statistics have fluctuated slightly over time, but the trend is that Pacific Islanders are about half as likely as the general population to hold bachelor’s degrees, and even less likely to receive advanced degrees.

…Before 1997, the federal standard for racial classification grouped Asians and Pacific Islanders together. But 16 years ago, the standards were updated, and Pacific Islanders and Asians were recognized as two distinct groups. Unfortunately, the myth of a homogeneous “Asian Pacific” race persists, and the use of “API” data suggests that statistics on “Asian Pacific Islanders” reflect the conditions of both Asians and Pacific Islanders.

They don’t….

Read the entire article here.

Race Appeal: How Candidates Invoke Race in U.S. Political Campaigns

Temple University Press
January 2011
272 pages
6 x 9
38 tables, 23 halftones
paper ISBN: 978-1-43990-276-9
cloth: ISBN: 978-1-43990-275-2
e-Book ISBN: 978-1-43990-277-6

Charlton D. McIlwain, Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication
New York University

Stephen M. Caliendo, Professor of Political Science
North Central College in Naperville, Illinois

Why, when, and how often candidates use race appeals, and how the electorate responds

In our evolving American political culture, whites and blacks continue to respond very differently to race-based messages and the candidates who use them. Race Appeal examines the use and influence such appeals have on voters in elections for federal office in which one candidate is a member of a minority group.

Charlton McIlwain and Stephen Caliendo use various analysis methods to examine candidates who play the race card in political advertisements. They offer a compelling analysis of the construction of verbal and visual racial appeals and how the news media covers campaigns involving candidates of color.

Combining rigorous analyses with in-depth case studies-including an examination of race-based appeals in the historic 2008 presidential election—Race Appeal is a groundbreaking work that represents the most extensive and thorough treatment of race-based appeals in American political campaigns to date.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. The Political Landscape of Race-Based Appeals
• Part I The Empirical Evidence on Race Appeals
  • 1. Producing Race Appeal: The Political Ads of White and Minority Candidates
  • 2. The Advantages and Disadvantages of Deploying Racist Appeals among Black and White Voters
  • 3. Neither Black nor White: The Fruitless Appeal to Racial Authenticity
  • 4. Competing Novelties: How Newspapers Frame the Election Campaigns of Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans
• Part II: Case Studies in Race Appeal
  • 5. Racializing Immigration Policy: Issue Ads in the 2006 Election
  • 6. Harold Ford Jr., Mel Martinez, and Artur Davis: Case Studies in Racially Framed News
  • 7. Barack Obama, Race-Based Appeals, and the 2008 Presidential Election
• Epilogue. Racialized Campaigns: What Have We Learned, and Where Do We Go from Here?
• Notes
• References
• Index

OMB’s Preliminary Recommendation & an IV Commentary

Interracial Voice [1995-2003]
July 1997

Charles Michael Byrd

The Office of Management and Budget announced last Wednesday (07-09-97) that Americans could choose more than one racial category on Census and other federal forms but would have no new “multiracial” box to check under new rules the agency proposed. OMB rejected creation of a multiracial category because “there is no general understanding of what the term means,” said the federal task force that made the recommendation in a report being published in last Wednesday’s Federal Register. OMB has also called for a sixty-day public comment period, during which you may voice your support or opposition for this proposal. The OMB website has detailed information concerning email and snail-mail addresses to which you may forward messages.

This is not a multiracial category per se, rather a scheme where the government requires the individual to parcel out portions of his or her identity to two or more of the established racial groups. Not only is there no consideration or understanding that the individual may not recognize these groups as valid in terms of identity and affiliation, there is no symbol or icon—specifically a multiracial header—representative of a self-determined, integral being who self-identifies other than monoracially.

Even for those of mixed-race who do view the current racial groups as valid, there is still no specific multiracial designation. According to OMB, “When the data are reported, counts should be provided of the number of persons who checked two races, three races or four races, and information on the combinations should also be provided.” In other words, the government will effectively disperse the individual’s identity in two or more directions and at day’s end will have reduced it to a mere mathematical computation—a cleverly negotiated line segment along the political color continuum.

To not be totally cynical and negative, let me add that this “check all that apply” format is a step toward a recognition of multiraciality—albeit not a huge one…

Read the entire article here.

Why the multiracial community must march on July 20!

Interracial Voice [1995-2003]
July 1996

Charles Michael Byrd

Any group needs and deserves to know why someone makes a particular decision, especially when that person asks them to act upon that decision, to contribute and participate. So, too, you need to understand the reasons behind the calling for a march—the Multiracial Solidarity March—scheduled for Saturday, July 20, 1996, on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

There has never been an attempt to bring together large numbers of mixed-race individuals to petition the government for anything—in this case, a multiracial Census category that would allow millions of Americans to, for the first time, legally self-identify. This march will be the first ever devoted to multiracial rights and to offering the perspective of racially mixed people on racial issues…

Read the entire article here.

Winning the Race

NYU Alumni Magazine
Fall 2012

Andrea Crawford

As the first African-American president runs for reelection, researchers examine the subliminal influence of political ads

 In 1990, longtime North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms was trailing challenger Harvey Gantt, an African-American who supported affirmative action, when the Helms campaign produced the infamous “hands” commercial. As the camera focused on the hands of a white person holding a letter, the narrator said: “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority.” Helms went on to win the election.

In another famous appeal, an ad for the 1988 Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush featured the menacing mug shot of convicted murderer Willie Horton. The spot explained how the African-American had committed assault while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison—a program supported by Michael Dukakis, the state’s governor and the Democratic presidential candidate. Bush won the presidency in a landslide.

It was into this environment that Charlton McIlwain, associate professor of media, culture, and communication at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, came of age. These types of appeals clearly work, he thought, and he set out to determine how and why. Around the same time, David Amodio was first exploring research that showed self-avowed egalitarians actually exhibited unconscious biases. Now an NYU associate professor of psychology and neural science, he began his career asking how such automatic types of prejudice could exist in opposition to one’s beliefs. Until recently, these kinds of questions were complicated by a reliance on often-flawed self-reports—people simply feel uncomfortable admitting bias and are sometimes not even conscious of it. But today, McIlwain and Amodio have come together in a timely pursuit. As the first African-American president runs for reelection, they are investigating the power of racial appeals in political ads by turning to neuroscience…

Read the entire article here.

I’m a kosher burrito, says new mixed-race LA mayor

The Jewish Chronicle Online
London, England
2013-05-30

Tom Tugend

Eric Garcetti, the first Jewish mayor elected by Los Angeles voters, jokingly refers to himself as a “kosher burrito”, the latter word referring to a popular Mexican dish.

The son of a Jewish mother and a father of Mexican and Italian descent, the hip, good-looking Garcetti, 42, was a popular figure at Oxford’s L’Chaim Society when he attended the university as a Rhodes Scholar between 1993 and 1995.

LA, incorporated as a municipality in 1850, has had Mexican-American, African-American and lots of Anglo mayors, but in this year’s race the top three contenders all had strong Jewish ties…

Read the entire aritcle here.

On the ideology of Hypodescent: Political Conservatism Predicts Categorization of Racially Ambiguous Faces as Black

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
In Press (May 2013)
32 pages

Amy R. Krosch
Department of Psychology
New York University

Leslie Berntsen
University of Southern California

David M. Amodio, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science
New York University

John T. Jost, Professor of Psychology and Politics
New York University

Jay J. Van Bavel, Assistant Professor of Psychology
New York University

According to the principle of hypodescent, multiracial individuals are categorized according to their most socially subordinate group membership. We investigated whether the tendency to apply this principle is related to political ideology. In three studies, participants categorized a series of morphed faces that varied in terms of racial ambiguity. In each study, self-reported conservatism (vs. liberalism) was associated with the tendency to categorize ambiguous faces as Black. Consistent with the notion that system justification motivation helps to explain ideological differences in racial categorization, the association between conservatism and hypodescent was mediated by individual differences in opposition to equality (Study 2) and was stronger when U.S. participants categorized American than Canadian faces (Study 3). We discuss ways in which the categorization of racially ambiguous individuals in terms of their most subordinate racial group may exacerbate inequality and vulnerability to discrimination.

Barack Obama (2004) jokingly describes his mother as “White as milk,” but the fact is that he is seen as the United States’ first Black president. Following the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws and the gradual normalizing of interracial relationships, the United States of America has become an increasingly multiracial society, with a 32% increase in the number of citizens identifying as more than one race over the last decade (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011). Nevertheless, monoracial labels are frequently applied to multiracial individuals, and “White” is rarely applied to persons of mixed racial heritage (Hirschfeld, 1995).

The tendency to categorize multiracial individuals according to their most socially subordinate racial group membership reflects the principle of hypodescent, which is closely associated with the notorious “one drop rule” in American history (Banks & Eberhardt, 1998; Hollinger, 2003). From the earliest days of American slavery through the Civil Rights Era, this principle was formally employed to subjugate individuals with any non-White heritage by denying them full rights and liberties under the law. For instance, individuals who had lived in the United States for years but were one-quarter or even one-eighth Japanese were forced to live in internment camps during World War II (Werner, 2000).

Social psychological research reveals that the principle of hypodescent characterizes racial categorization even today. When research participants are presented with images of Black/White biracial targets, they are more likely to classify them as Black than White (e.g., Halberstadt, Sherman, & Sherman, 2011; Ho, Sidanius, Levin, & Banaji, 2011; Peery & Bodenhausen, 2008). Furthermore, it appears to take fewer minority characteristics (e.g., facial features or ancestors) to be judged as “Black,” compared to the proportion of majority characteristics it takes to be judged as “White” (Ho et al., 2011)…

…In this article, we propose that biased racial categorization may also be related to ideological motives. Prior research has indicated that race perception and categorization may be influenced by a number of motives, including social identification (Knowles & Peng, 2005) and biological essentialism (Plaks, Malahy, Sedlins, & Shoda, 2012). Furthermore, Caruso, Mead, and Balcetis (2009) found that political conservatives were more likely to believe that a darkened photo of Barack Obama represented his actual appearance, as compared with liberals and moderates. These results are broadly consistent with public opinion data revealing that Republicans are more likely than Democrats and Independents to state that President Obama is Black rather than biracial (Pew Research Center, 2011). In the current research, we explored whether liberals and conservatives would differ in their categorization of racially ambiguous individuals in a nonpolitical context and examined potential psychological mediators of this proposed relationship. More specifically, we conducted three studies to investigate the hypothesis that there would be ideological differences in biased racial categorization…

Read the entire article here.

Bullying Pulpit: Racism, Barack Obama and the Selective Call for Personal Responsibility

Tim Wise, Antiracist Essayist, Author and Educator
2013-05-19

Tim Wise

Sometimes, white privilege isn’t about stuff. It’s not always about better opportunities, or more money, or even greater access to those things than people of color.

Sometimes, white privilege is as simple as knowing that, generally speaking, if you’re white, you’ll be perceived as competent and hard-working until proven otherwise, while people of color — even those who have proven themselves competent and hard-working — will still be subjected to presumptions that they just might not be, and that somehow, they (but not you) need to be reminded of the importance of hard-work and personal responsibility, lest they (but never you) revert to some less impressive group mean.

To wit, President Obama’s commencement address today at Morehouse College — one of the nation’s preeminent institutions of higher learning, and perhaps its most famous historically black college or university — during which, among plenty of rather standard commencement speech boilerplate, the president lectured this year’s graduates about the importance of taking personal responsibility for their lives, and not blaming racism for whatever obstacles they may face in the future.

It’s hard to know what’s more disturbing.

Either that President Obama thinks black grads at one of the nation’s best colleges really need to be lectured about such matters; or, alternately, that White America is so desirous of exculpation for the history of racial discrimination that we need him to say such things, and he knows it, thereby feeding us the moral scolding of black men we so desperately desire and love to hear.

Either way, the result is tragic…

Read the entire article here.