Mixed Race Studies

‘Americanah’ Author Explains ‘Learning’ To Be Black In The U.S.

Fresh Air from WHYY
National Public Radio
2013-06-27

Terry Gross, Host

When the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was growing up in Nigeria she was not used to being identified by the color of her skin. That changed when she arrived in the United States for college. As a black African in America, Adichie was suddenly confronted with what it meant to be a person of color in the United States. Race as an idea became something that she had to navigate and learn.

The learning process took some time and was episodic. Adichie recalls, for example, an undergraduate class in which the subject of watermelon came up. A student had said something about watermelon to an African-American classmate, who was offended by the comment.

“I remember sitting there thinking, ‘But what’s so bad about watermelons? Because I quite like watermelons,’ ” Adichie tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.

She felt that her African-American classmate was annoyed with her because Adichie didn’t share her anger — but she didn’t have the context to understand why. The history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was not taught to students in Nigeria. Adichie had yet to learn fully about the history of slavery — and its continuing reverberations — in the U.S.

“Race is such a strange construct,” says Adichie, “because you have to learn what it means to be black in America. So you have to learn that watermelon is supposed to be offensive.”

Adichie is a MacArthur Fellowship winner and author of the novels Purple Hibiscus and Half of A Yellow Sun. Her new novel, Americanah, explores this question of what it means to be black in the U.S., and tells the story of a young Nigerian couple, one of whom leaves for England and the other of whom leaves for America.

The title, she says, is a Nigerian word for those who have been to the U.S. and return with American affectations.

“It’s often used,” she says, “in the context of a kind of gentle mockery.”…

Read the transcript here. Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here.

Racial Capitalism

Harvard Law Review
Volume 126, Number 8 (June 2013)
pages 2151-2226

Nancy Leong, Associate Professor
University of Denver, Sturm College of Law

Racial capitalism—the process of deriving social and economic value from racial identity—is a longstanding, common, and deeply problematic practice. This Article is the first to identify racial capitalism as a systemic phenomenon and to undertake a close examination of its causes and consequences.

The Article focuses on instances of racial capitalism in which white individuals and predominantly white institutions use non-white people to acquire social and economic value. Our affirmative action doctrine provides much of the impetus for this form of racial capitalism. That doctrine has fueled an intense legal and social preoccupation with the notion of diversity, which encourages white individuals and predominantly white institutions to engage in racial capitalism by using non-white people to acquire social and economic value. An examination of these consequences is particularly timely given the Supreme Court’s recent grant of certiorari in Fisher v. University of Texas.

Racial capitalism has serious negative consequences both for individuals and for society as a whole. The process of racial capitalism requires commodification of racial identity, which degrades that identity by reducing it to another thing to be bought and sold. Commodification also fosters racial resentment by causing non-white people to feel used or exploited by white people. And the superficial value assigned to non-whiteness within a system of racial capitalism displaces measures that would lead to meaningful social reform.

In an ideal society, commodification of racial identity would not occur. Given the imperfections of our current society, however, the Article instead proposes a pragmatic approach of reactive commodification. Under this approach, we would discourage commodification of race. But if commodification did occur, we would identify it as commodification, call attention to its harms, and ensure that non-white individuals received compensation for the value derived from their racial identity. This approach would ultimately allow progress toward a society in which we successfully recognize and respect racial identity without engaging in racial capitalism.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• INTRODUCTION
• I. Valuing Race
  • A. Whiteness as Property
  • B. Diversity as Revaluation
  • C. The Worth of Non-Whiteness
• II. A Theory of Racial Capital
  • A. Race as Marxian Capital
  • B. Race as Social Capital
  • C. Racial Capital
• III. Critiquing Racial Capitalism
  • A. Commodification
  • B. Individual Harms
    • 1. Fractured Identity
    • 2. Performance Demands
    • 3. Economic Disadvantage
  • C. Social Harms
    • 1. Impoverished Discourse
    • 2. Racial Resentment
    • 3. Displaced Reform
• IV. A Way Forward
• CONCLUSION

…This Article is the first to identify racial capitalism as a systemic phenomenon and the first to describe the way that non-whiteness, in particular, is capitalized. Of course, assigning value to race is nothing new for America. Whiteness has been a source of value throughout our history, conferring power and privilege on the possessor. Courts have recognized the value of whiteness—for example, they have held that calling a white person “black” constitutes defamation and therefore qualifies for legal redress. Litigants have also acknowledged the value of whiteness—for example, in Plessy v. Ferguson, Homer Plessy referred to his racial identity as the “most valuable sort of property.” And scholars have examined the value of whiteness—for example, Cheryl Harris’ acclaimed work Whiteness as Property posits that whiteness is a kind of “status property” that can be both analogized to conventional forms of property and literally converted to those forms…

Read the entire article here.

A Nation of Mutts

The New York Times
2013-06-28

David Brooks

Over the past few decades, American society has been transformed in a fit of absence of mind. First, we’ve gone from a low immigrant nation to a high immigrant nation. If you grew up between 1950 and 1985, you grew up at a time when only about 5 percent or 6 percent of American residents were foreign born. Today, roughly 13 percent of American residents are foreign born, and we’re possibly heading to 15 percent.

Moreover, up until now, America was primarily an outpost of European civilization. Between 1830 and 1880, 80 percent of the immigrants came from Northern and Western Europe. Over the following decades, the bulk came from Southern and Central Europe. In 1960, 75 percent of the foreign-born population came from Europe, with European ideas and European heritage.

Soon, we will no longer be an outpost of Europe, but a nation of mutts, a nation with hundreds of fluid ethnicities from around the world, intermarrying and intermingling. Americans of European descent are already a minority among 5-year-olds. European-Americans will be a minority over all in 30 years at the latest, and probably sooner…

…Soon there will be no dominant block, just complex networks of fluid streams — Vietnamese, Bengalis, Kazakhs. It’s a bit like the end of the cold war when bipolar thinking had to give way to a radically multipolar mind-set.

Because high immigration is taking place at a time of unprecedentedly low ethnic hostility, we’re seeing high rates of intermarriage. This creates large numbers of hybrid individuals, biracial or triracial people with names like Enrique Cohen-Chan. These people transcend existing categories and soften the social boundaries between groups.

This won’t lead to a bland mélange America but probably a move to ethnic re-orthodoxy. As Alvaro Vargas Llosa points out in his book, “Global Crossings,” the typical pattern is that the more third-generation people assimilate, the more they also value their ethnic roots. We could soon see people with completely unaccented English joining Chinese-American Federations and Honduran-American Support Networks…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Gilberto Freyre: The Reassessment Continues

Latin American Research Review
Volume 43, Number 1, 2008
pages 208-218
DOI: 10.1353/lar.2008.0002

David Lehmann, Reader in Social Science
University of Cambridge

Gilberto Freyre e os estudos latino-americanos. Edited by Joshua Lund and Malcolm McNee. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, Universidad de Pittsburgh, 2006. Pp. 399.

Casa-grande e senzala. By Gilberto Freyre. Critical edition by Guillermo Giucci, Enrique Rodríguez Larreta, and Edson Nery da Fonseca. Madrid: Acordo Archivos ALLCA XX, 2002. Pp. 1297.

Gilberto Freyre: um vitoriano dos tropicos. By Maria Lúcia Garcia Pallares-Burke. São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2005. Pp. 484.

Casa-grande e senzala was published when Freyre, born in 1900, was only thirty-three years old. This precocious book dealt with a vast range of themes and a variety of sources, and its largely non-Brazilian intellectual precursors were beyond the physical and even intellectual range of Freyre’s contemporaries, few of whom had traveled to the United States or even to Europe, as Freyre had done in the early and late 1920s. The mere length of the book, as Thomas Skidmore has noted, put off established publishers. Casa-grande probably drew on all the then-published historical writing on Brazil in Portuguese, English, and French, as well as on comparative medical and anatomical studies, travel literature, ethnographies of different parts of Africa, and published colonial reports, plus a sprinkling of quasi-ethnographic personal reminiscence. Already at that age, Freyre, though himself from an urban professional, rather than landholding, family, deployed his trademark patrician assuredness. He invented his own genre—a propensity for ex cathedra pronouncements and self-glorification, combined with an intellectual curiosity at once undisciplined and creative.

At first, as the essays in the volume edited by Lund and McNee often remind us, Freyre’s book had the effect of an earthquake, though admittedly in a very small intellectual elite. In 2001, Antonio Candido recalled a friend from the left-wing branch of a prominent political family going to the mirror on reading it and musing, “Acho que sou mulato!” (Lund and McNee, 10). Lilia Schwarz elaborates by reminding us in the same collection that the Estado Novo itself fell under the influence of Freyre, implementing official projects in which mestiçagem (racial mixture) was recognized as “a verdadeira nacionalidade,” Brazil’s true nationality (314), although on this one might also find contrary evidence, notably the notorious case of the sculpture “O homem brasileiro,” by Celso Antonio.

Whatever individuals’ disposition toward the black population and the poor, the climate of public debate in Brazil at the time started from the assumption that the black skin and African descent of a large portion of the population was in some sense a problem; Freyre on the contrary told them it was a solution. Freyre had little knowledge of or interest in the recent European immigrants who were fl ooding into the South; for him the Portuguese were not white at all, their mestiço heritage shaped by centuries of Arab presence among them. Clearly Casa-grande is written by a confident member of the Northeastern elite, but is it written by a “white man”? In a telling passage quoted by Neil Larsen (Lund and McNee, 382), Freyre evokes almost voluptuously the black influence in “everything that is a sincere expression of life . . . the tenderness, the exaggerated mimicry, the Catholicism that indulges our senses, music, language, gait and the lullabies . . . the escrava who nursed us and fed us and told us our first children’s horror stories, the mulata who so deliciously extracted the first splinter from our feet and, finally and inevitably, the woman who initiated us into the delights of physical love and gave us our first sense of male completeness, to the creaking sounds of the chaise lounge” (Freyre, 301, my translation). Who is—or are—this “us”? The writer is reflected impersonally in the text like the artist in Velázquez’s Las Meninas.

Freyre is often credited—or blamed—for coining and spreading the myth of “racial democracy.” It is repeated with particular insistence, near unanimity, and no small dose of righteous indignation among those whom Brazilian writers describe as Brazilianists—not, note, Brazilianistas—as well as by several Brazilian authorities. In a 1996 article, George Reid Andrews (the quality of whose work on race in Brazil is otherwise not in doubt) seems to refer the reader to the 1946 English translation of Casa-grande in support of the claim that Freyre coined the term, but I could find no such thing on the page quoted! More recently, to take but one of innumerable examples, Robin Sheriff states that Casa-grande “reconstituted the country as a democracia racial.”  Thankfully, in a 2002 paper published on the Internet, Levy Cruz provides the results of what must be the most exhaustive effort so far to uncover whether and when Freyre used the expression. The results are a testimony to Cruz’s archaeological talents on the one hand, and unfortunately, on the other, to the capacity of academics sometimes to believe and propagate a malign fiction, like a slow-motion lynch mob. Cruz first reminds us not only that the belief has been attributed to Freyre that Brazil is a racial democracy, but also that he has been blamed for perpetuating racial discrimination in Brazil on account of the false consciousness engendered by the myth! But then he goes on to show decisively that there is not a single instance where Freyre stated that Brazil is a racial democracy. He did state several times, though mostly in lectures and statements for English-speaking audiences, that Brazil might be on a path toward an “ethnic or racial democracy,” and in the English translation of Sobrados e mucambos, he inserted in an additional final sentence the statement that “Brazil is becoming more and more a racial democracy, characterized by an almost unique combination of diversity and unity.”  The nearest he gets in Portuguese is in an interview from 1980 published very obscurely in Recife, when he says that Brazil is far from a pure democracy in any sense (“racial, social or political”) but “is the nearest thing in the world to a racial democracy.” It is worth noting that here he uses the expression democracia relativa, which had figured in the vocabulary of the military government during its prolonged and tortuous “decompression” of the mid- to late 1970s. Freyre might have helped his own reputation on the left—if that had mattered to him—and among social scientists generally had he taken more care with his use of terms; but let us not forget how much he became a political animal, more concerned to navigate different currents of opinion than to achieve analytical coherence. Indeed, one source of the “racial democracy” imbroglio is his practice of projecting different personae at home and abroad: a study of Freyre’s management of his translations and of his persona outside Brazil (para inglês ver . . .) would be of great interest. Overall, however, one can well sympathize with Hermano Vianna’s outburst about “the myth of the myth of racial democracy” (quoted in Lund and McNee, 40)…

Read the entire article here.

The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach About Being Different

James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
Rice University
2011-09-15, 18:00-19:30 CDT

Jenifer L. Bratter, Host & Associate Professor of Sociology
Rice University

New York University sociology professor Ann Morning, Ph.D., analyzes how scientists influence ideas about race through teachings and textbooks.

Ann Morning, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sociology at New York University. She studies race and ethnicity, especially racial classification; multiracial populations; demography; and the sociology of knowledge and science. In her book “The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference,” Morning explores the ways scientists are influencing ideas about race through teaching and textbooks — even as the scientific community debates the issue. She also examines how corporations and the government use scientific research in ways that often reinforce the idea that race is biologically determined. Morning holds her Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University.
 
This event is co-sponsored by the Baker Institute Science and Technology Policy Program, the Race Scholars at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research and the Department of Sociology at Rice University.

Video Duration: 01:25:44

New Faces, Old Faces: Counting the Multiracial Population Past and Present

Ann Morning, Associate Professor of Sociology
New York University

Chapter in:

New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century
SAGE Publications, Inc.
Paperback ISBN: 9780761923008
2002
432 pages

Edited by:

Loretta I. Winters
California State University, Northridge

Herman L. DeBose
California State University, Northridge

Multiracial Americans have often been heralded as “new people” and in fact have been rediscovered as such more than once in the last century. Charles Chesnutt’s 1899 novel The House Behind the Cedars features a mulatto character who uses the phrase to describe himself and others like him; in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, “the new Negro” described a people that was “neither African nor European, but both” (Williamson, 1980, p. 3). More recently, Forbes (1993) has used the term “Neo-Americans” to denote populations combining African, European, and American Indian roots, and a century after Chesnutt’s work appeared, numerous articles and books—including this volume—convey the sense of multiraciality’s newness in titles such as “Brave New Faces” (Alaya, 2001) or “The New Face of Race” (Meacham, 2000).

Yet having populated North America for nearly four centuries, mixed-race people are far from being a recent phenomenon in the United States. Their early presence has been recorded to greater and lesser degrees in legal records, literature, and historical documentation. As far back as the 1630s and 1640s, colonial records attest to the punishment of interracial sexual unions and the regulation of mulattoes’ slave status (Williamson, 1980). Dictionaries chart 16th-century English usage of the word mulatow (Sollors, 2000), although the meaning of this term has varied over time (Forbes, 1993). Finally, mixed-race people have long populated American literature, particularly since the early 19th century (Sollors, 2000). In sum, the multiracial community is not a new, 20th century phenomenon but rather a long-standing element of American society.

By obscuring the historic dimensions of American multiraciality—emphasizing its newness but not its oldness—we may run the risk of ignoring lessons that past racial stratification offers for understanding today’s outcomes. For one thing, older social norms still make themselves felt in contemporary discussion of mixed-race identity (Davis, 1991; Waters, 1991; Wilson, 1992). In addition, history reminds us that these attitudes toward multiraciality were embedded in complex webs of social, political, economic, and cultural premises and objectives, thereby suggesting that the same holds true today. Finally, turning to the past highlights how malleable racial concepts have proved to be over time despite the permanence and universality we often ascribe to them. Given the United States’ history, the extent to which public attitudes toward mixed-race unions and ancestry have changed is remarkable. Perhaps the real new people today are not just those of multiracial heritage but also Americans in general who now conceptualize, tolerate, or embrace multiple-race identities in ways that were unacceptable in the past.

The history of census enumeration and scientific estimation of the multiracial population in the United States offers an illuminating window onto older conceptions of mixed-race status and a thought-provoking opportunity to compare past treatment of this community with its contemporary reflection. Although the introduction of multiple-race self-description on the 2000 census is often depicted as an entirely new innovation—much as multiracial people themselves are considered to be a new group (Nobles, 2000)—it was not in fact the first time that mixed-race origins have been recorded on the U.S. census. In the 19th century, multiracial response categories were a common, if sporadic, feature of decennial censuses whose appearance and disappearance can be traced to the social, political, and economic outlooks of the nation’s white citizenry at the time. Accordingly, this chapter seeks both to describe historical practices for counting the mixed-race population and to link them with the racial ideologies that motivated and shaped them. Although the focus is on national census enumeration, I also study the efforts of scientists who sought for over a century to estimate the size of the multiracial population and who tended to share the same preoccupations and preconceptions about race as the census officials of their day. Finally, I consider possible implications of the historical record for our understanding of the introduction of multiplerace classification on the 2000 census, suggesting that factors similar to those that weighed in the past are still discernible today…

Read the entire chapter here.

Professor Dorothy Roberts — Challenging Concepts of Race

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-06-26, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Dorothy E. Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Dorothy Roberts is the fourteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania, where she holds appointments in the Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics.

Professor Roberts is the author of the award-winning books Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Random House/Pantheon, 1997) and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books/Civitas, 2002), as well as co-editor of six books on constitutional law and gender. She has also published more than eighty articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review.  Her latest book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, was published by the New Press in July 2011.

For more information, click here.

Who is Latino?

The Washington Post
2013-06-21

Carlos Lozada, Editor of Outlook, The Washington Post’s Sunday section for opinion, analysis

‘Shut up, you stupid Mexican!”

The words spewed from the mouth of a pale, freckle-faced boy, taunting me on our elementary school playground.

I wish I could recall what I said to inspire the insult. But more than three decades later, I remember only my reply. “Stupid Peruvian,” I pointed out, wagging my finger.

My family had emigrated from Lima to Northern California a few years earlier, so my nationality was a point of fact (whereas my stupidity remains a matter of opinion). The response so confused my classmate that my first encounter with prejudice ended as quickly as it started. Recess resumed.

Today, my grade-school preoccupation with nationality feels a bit quaint. Peruvian or Mexican — does it even matter? We’re all Latinos now…

…If all ethnic identities are created, imagined or negotiated to some degree, American Hispanics provide an especially stark example. As part of an effort in the 1970s to better measure who was using what kind of social services, the federal government established the word “Hispanic” to denote anyone with ancestry traced to Spain or Latin America, and mandated the collection of data on this group. “The term is a U.S. invention,” explains Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center. “If you go to El Salvador or the Dominican Republic, you won’t necessarily hear people say they are ‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic.’ ”

You may not hear it much in the United States, either. According to a 2012 Pew survey, only about a quarter of Hispanic adults say they identify themselves most often as Hispanic or Latino. About half say they prefer to cite their family’s country of origin, while one-fifth say they use “American.” (Among third-generation Latinos, nearly half identify as American.)

The Office of Management and Budget defines a Hispanic as “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race” — about as specific as calling someone European.

“There is no coherence to the term,” says Marta Tienda, a sociologist and director of Latino studies at Princeton University. For instance, even though it’s officially supposed to connote ethnicity and nationality rather than race — after all, Hispanics can be black, white or any other race — the term “has become a racialized category in the United States,” Tienda says. “Latinos have become a race by default, just by usage of the category.”…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Whither White America?

The American Prospect
2013-06-13

Jamelle Bouie

More thoughts on the future of white people.

“Majority-minority” is an unusual term—by definition, minorities are no longer such if they’re in the majority—but it’s a convenient shorthand for what most people expect to happen in the United States over the next few decades. A growing population of nonwhites—driven by Asian and Latino immigration—will yield a country where most Americans have nonwhite heritage, thus “majority-minority.”

The most recent analysis from the Census Bureau seems to bear this out. Last year was the first year that whites were a minority of all newborns, and based on current rates of growth, they’ll become a minority of the under–five set by next year, if not the end of this one. Overall, the government projects that within five years, minorities will compromise a majority of all Americans under the age of eighteen, something to keep in mind when trying to project future political support for both parties…

…One fact stands out in all of this, however. The fastest growing group of Americans—by far—fall under the “multiracial category.” If past research is any indication, these Americans are likely the product of intermarriage between whites and Hispanics (the most common interracial pairing) or whites and Asians (the next most common one). While we identify them as nonwhite, we don’t know how they’ll identify themselves in the future.

My hunch is that—as (certain groups of) Latinos and Asians integrate themselves into American life—a good number will identify themselves as white, with Hispanic or Asian heritage, in the same way that many white Americans point to their Irish or Italian backgrounds…

Read the entire article here.

Not Quite White: Arabs, Slavs, and the Contours of Contested Whiteness

Typecast Releasing
2012
USA
English
24 minutes

Jamil Khoury, Director and Writer

Stephen Combs, Director

Inspired by Jamil Khoury’s short play WASP: White Arab Slovak Pole, Not Quite White: Arabs, Slavs, and the Contours of Contested Whiteness is a thought-provoking documentary that explores the complicated relationship of Arab and Slavic immigrants to American notions of whiteness.

The film integrates scenes from WASP alongside interviews with Arab American and Polish American academics who reflect upon contested and probationary categories of whiteness and the use of anti-Black racism as a “whitening” dye.

In Not Quite White, Jamil Khoury (Artistic Director of Chicago’s Silk Road Rising) draws upon his own Arab (Syrian) and Slavic (Polish and Slovak) heritage as the lens through which to investigate the broader issue of immigrants achieving whiteness and hence qualifying as “fully American.” The film advances society’s on-going conversations about the meaning of whiteness and efforts at redefining whiteness.

Not just for white people, and not just for Arabs and Slavs, Not Quite White proceeds from the assumption that whiteness affects all our lives and that we all need to critically engage whiteness. “Whiteness has everything to do with melanin and pigmentation and it has nothing to do with melanin and pigmentation,” Khoury observes. “Whiteness is about power and borders and authorship. And whiteness can, and does, change.”

The academics featured in Not Quite White include: Roxane Assaf, Adjunct Faculty, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Ann Hetzel Gunkel, Director of Cultural Studies, Columbia College Chicago; John Tofik Karam, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies, De Paul University; Dominic A. Pacyga, Professor of History, Columbia College Chicago.

DVD copies also include On Whiteness, a 16-minute video essay in which writer and co-director Jamil Khoury discusses the themes and ideas presented in his film. Khoury’s short film both/and is also available from Typecast here.