Mixed Race Studies

Cheerios stands by TV ad showing mixed-race family

Associated Press
2013-06-05

Leanne Italie, Entertainment and Lifestyles Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — A mom sits at her kitchen table when her grade schooler saunters up with a big box of Cheerios.

“Mom,” says the girl. “Dad told me Cheerios is good for your heart. Is that true?”

Cut to dad waking from a nap on the living room couch with a pile of Cheerios on his chest (where his heart is) crunchily cascading to the floor.

The message is in line with the company’s Heart Healthy campaign, except this 30-second ad features a black dad, white mom and biracial child and produced enough vitriol on YouTube last week that Cheerios requested the comments section be turned off.

This week, the company is standing by the fictitious family, which reflects a black-white racial mix uncommon in commercials today, especially in ads on TV, at a time when interracial and interethnic couples are on the rise in real life, according to 2010 U.S. Census data, brand strategists and marketing consultants.

“The reality is that in general most big companies don’t want to take a lot of risks,” said Laura Ries, who has written five books on marketing and brand strategy and consults for companies large, small and in between.

“The ability for nameless, faceless people to get on the Internet is out there, and companies don’t like it when people yell at them,” she said.

Camille Gibson, vice president of marketing for Cheerios, said it’s the first time the ad campaign that focuses on family moments has featured an interracial couple, with General Mills Inc. casting the actors to reflect the changing U.S. population.

“We felt like we were reflecting an American family,” Gibson said…

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Black-White Biracial Children’s Social Development from Kindergarten to Fifth Grade: Links with Racial Identification, Gender, and Socioeconomic Status

Social Development
Volume 23, Issue 1 (February 2014)
pages 157–177
DOI: 10.1111/sode.12037

Annamaria Csizmadia, Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
University of Connecticut, Stamford

Jean M. Ispa, Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
University of Missouri, Columbia

In this study, we investigated trajectories of Black-White biracial children’s social development during middle childhood, their associations with parents’ racial identification of children, and the moderating effects of child gender and family socioeconomic status (SES). The study utilized data from parent and teacher reports on 293 US Black-White biracial children enrolled in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). Growth curve models suggested increasing trajectories of teacher-reported internalizing and externalizing behaviors between kindergarten and fifth grade. Parents’ racial identification of children predicted child externalizing behavior trajectories such that teachers rated biracially identified children’s externalizing behaviors lower relative to those of Black- and White-identified children. Additionally, for White-identified biracial children, the effect of family SES on internalizing behavior trajectories was especially pronounced. These findings suggest that in the USA, how parents racially identify their Black-White biracial children early on has important implications for children’s problem behaviors throughout the elementary school years.

Read or purchase the article here.

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.

What Makes you Black?

Ebony Magazine
Volume 38, Number 3 (January 1983)
pages 115-118

Vague definition of race is the basis for court battles

Imagine going to get a passport so you and your spouse can take a vacation in South America. Its all a formality, you reason; people just want to make sure you’re who and what you say you are. You fill out the form and, to your bewilderment, a clerk tells you she can’t give you the passport because you’re of a different race than what you claim to be.

It happened to 48-year-old Susie Guillory Phipps, who lives in Sulphur, La. She had been thinking all along that she was White, but her birth certificate indicated she was “Colored.”

“I was sick,” she later told reporters. “I couldn’t believe it.” She said she went home crying and told her husband she didn’t want to take the trip. It was the beginning of a 5-year court battle to get the State of Louisiana to change her birth certificate and the certificates of her six brothers and sisters. She also wants the states racial classification law declared unconstitutional. The law, approved by the Louisiana legislature in 1970, states that a person is Black if he or she has “1/32 Negro blood.” Louisiana is the only state with a race classification law.

So far, Mrs. Phipps has spent some $20,000 to change her racial status to White. A genealogist hired by the state has concluded she is 3/32 Black.

Mrs. Phipps’ case (Susie Smith vs. the State of Louisiana), which might be decided very soon, is the latest of a number of similar cases that have occurred over the years. A celebrated case developed during the 1920s when Leonard Kip Rhinelander failed to get an annulment of his marriage to Alice Jones, who admitted to having “some Negro blood.” Rhinelander, the son of millionaire society leader Philip Rhinelander, contended his wife deceived him about her race before their marriage. In a later case, Ralph Dupas, a prizefighter who fought and lost to Sugar Ray Robinson in 1963, was barred from fighting Whites in Louisiana in the late 1950s when word surfaced that he was Black. (Louisiana at that time didn’t allow interracial athletics). He failed in his bid to prove he was White. Earlier, another Louisiana prizefighter, Bernard Docusen, wasn’t allowed to fight Whites in Louisiana because of reports that his mother was Black. He was later recognized as White when it was discovered his mother was White.

Just what does make a person Black? The fundamental problem here, according to experts interviewed for and cited in this article, is that there is no generally accepted scientific definition of race. Another related problem is the inconsistency in the classification of people in the three traditional racial groupings — Negroid, Caucasoid and Mongoloid. In current practice, Black genes define and dominate White genes. One Black ancestor, for example, makes an Anglo-Saxon or a Chinese person “Black.” But, for some strange reason, the rule doesn’t work the other way, and one Chinese or Anglo-Saxon ancestor doesn’t make a Black person Chinese or Anglo-Saxon. And it is interesting to note that if the “one-Black” rule were applied to the other races, the racial composition of the United States would change markedly. Dr. Munro Edmonson, a professor of anthropology at Tulane University, says the average American White person has five percent traceable Black genes and the average American Black person has 25 percent traceable White genes…

Read the entire article here.

Louisiana’s “Creoles of Color”: Ethnicity, Marginality, and Identity

Social Science Quarterly
Volume 73 Issue 3, September 1992
pages 615-

James H. Dormon, Alumni Distinguished Professor of History and American Studies
University of Southwestern Louisiana

This article traces the ethnohistory of Creoles of color, beginning with an examination of the social-historical order out of which they emerged, and argues the case that Creole marginality has been the major determinant of the Creole ethnic experience. While it is impossible to pinpoint the precise timing of the ethnogenesis of the group, it was certainly in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, during which years the group emerged as part of what the historian Laura Foner has termed a “three-caste social system” in colonial Louisiana. In the eighteenth century the dominant Louisiana population–the “hegemonic” population in current usage–was that of the white European elites (or those descending directly from such elites): large landowners and planter/merchants along with colonial officials, both civil and military. The increasingly large slave population, normally perceived by Europeans as African provided the agricultural labor deemed essential to staple crop production. Within the colonial social order, blacks were separated from the white population by caste lines written into law and generally enforced by social as well as legal sanctions. Yet from the beginning, and despite legal provisions forbidding the practice, whites and blacks established sexual contact, producing offspring that shared the genes of both parents.

Backlash greets Cheerios ad with interracial family

The Washington Post
2013-05-31

Mary C. Curtis

Here we go again, with more proof, if anyone needed it, that the post-racial American society some hoped the election of an African American president signified is far from here.

Who would have thought that breakfast cereal would trigger the latest racial battle line? In this case, a Cheerios ad much like every other homespun Cheerios ad — with a heart healthy message and loving family – ran into trouble from some commenters because of the kind of family it featured. Mom is white, dad is black and their cute little daughter is a mix of the both of them.

That’s it.

Cheerios had to disable comments on YouTube – I’m not going to repeat them but you can imagine the general witless racism with stereotypes about minorities and warnings of race-mixing as the end of civilization.

I didn’t take any of it personally, though my family’s morning breakfast ritual – black mom, white dad, son who is a mix of both of us – looks a lot like the ad if you subtract the general cheeriness before we get that first cup of coffee down…

Read the entire article here.

The United States of Mestizo

John F. Blair, Publisher
2013-01-01
48 pages
4¼ x 5½
978-1-58838-288-7
ebook ISBN: 978-1-60306-200-8

Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture
Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts

This powerful manifesto attests to the fundamental changes the nation has undergone in the last half-century. Ilan Stavans meditates on the way the cross-fertilizing process that defined the Americas during the colonial period—the racial melding of Europeans and indigenous people—was a foretelling of the current miscegenation that is the most salient profile of America today. If, as W. E. B. DuBois once argued, the 20th century was defined by a color fracture, Stavans believes that the 21st will be shaped by the multicolor line that will make us all a sum of parts.

Seeing Race in Modern America

University of North Carolina Press
November 2013
Approx. 264 pages
6.125 x 9.25
10 color plates., 97 halftones, notes, index
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4696-1068-9

Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies
Brown University

In this fiercely urgent book, Matthew Pratt Guterl focuses on how and why we come to see race in very particular ways. What does it mean to see someone as a color? As racially mixed or ethnically ambiguous? What history makes such things possible? Drawing creatively from advertisements, YouTube videos, and everything in between, Guterl redirects our understanding of racial sight away from the dominant categories of color–away from brown and yellow and black and white–and instead insists that we confront the visual practices that make those same categories seem so irrefutably important.

Zooming out for the bigger picture, Guterl illuminates the long history of the practice of seeing—and believing in—race, and reveals that our troublesome faith in the details discerned by the discriminating glance is widespread and very popular. In so doing, he upends the possibility of a postracial society by revealing how deeply race is embedded in our culture, with implications that are often matters of life and death.

Looking the Part: Social Status Cues Shape Race Perception

PLoS ONE
Volume 6, Issue 9: e25107
Published: 2011-09-26
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0025107

Jonathan B. Freemam,  Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Andrew M. Penner, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Matthias Scheutz, Associate Professor of Computer Science
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Nalini Ambady, Professor of Psychology
Stanford University

It is commonly believed that race is perceived through another’s facial features, such as skin color. In the present research, we demonstrate that cues to social status that often surround a face systematically change the perception of its race. Participants categorized the race of faces that varied along White–Black morph continua and that were presented with high-status or low-status attire. Low-status attire increased the likelihood of categorization as Black, whereas high-status attire increased the likelihood of categorization as White; and this influence grew stronger as race became more ambiguous (Experiment 1). When faces with high-status attire were categorized as Black or faces with low-status attire were categorized as White, participants’ hand movements nevertheless revealed a simultaneous attraction to select the other race-category response (stereotypically tied to the status cue) before arriving at a final categorization. Further, this attraction effect grew as race became more ambiguous (Experiment 2). Computational simulations then demonstrated that these effects may be accounted for by a neurally plausible person categorization system, in which contextual cues come to trigger stereotypes that in turn influence race perception. Together, the findings show how stereotypes interact with physical cues to shape person categorization, and suggest that social and contextual factors guide the perception of race.

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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.