Mixed Race Studies

Opinion: Black Americans must embrace true colors

In America: You define America. What defines you?
Cable News Network (CNN)
2012-12-15

Tiya Miles, Professor of American Culture, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Native American Studies
University of Michigan

Editor’s note: Historian and author Tiya Miles is a professor at the University of Michigan’s Afroamerican and African Studies department and a 2011 MacArthur genius award recipient.

(CNN) – In the documentary film “Black Indians,” a man who appears to be African-American recounts his delight at eliciting shocked looks from strangers when he launches into a conversation with his wife in the Cherokee language.

The man who tells this story is Cherokee as well as black and a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. His is just one among thousands of examples that show diversity has always been a core aspect of African-American identity.

That diversity has been rich – from the moment when Africans from different tribes, cultures and language groups were captured as slaves and transported to North America to the present day, when African-Americans live in various regions and intermarry with members of other ethnic groups.

The evidence of this diversity is so obvious that it may seem at times invisible.

Read the entire opinion piece here…

The Democrats’ Demographic Dreams

The American Prospect
2012-06-14

Jamelle Bouie, Staff Writer

Liberals are counting on population trends to doom 
Republicans to a long-term minority. They shouldn’t.

If Democrats agree on anything, it’s that they will eventually be on the winning side. The white Americans who tend to vote Republican are shrinking as a percentage of the population while the number of those who lean Democratic—African Americans and other minorities—is rapidly growing. Slightly more than half of American infants are now nonwhite. By 2050, the U.S. population is expected to increase by 117 million people, and the vast majority—82 percent of the 117 million—will be immigrants or the children of immigrants. In a little more than 30 years, the U.S. will be a “majority-minority” country. By 2050, white Americans will no longer be a solid majority but the largest plurality, at 46 percent. African Americans will drop to 12 percent, while Asian Americans will make up 8 percent of the population. The number of Latinos will rise to nearly a third of all Americans.
 
It’s become an article of faith among many progressives that these trends set the stage for a new Democratic majority. A decade ago, Ruy Teixeira and John B. Judis popularized this argument in their book The Emerging Democratic Majority. More recently, Jonathan Chait in New York magazine made a similar case: “The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction,” he wrote. “Conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests.”
 
At the moment, Democrats have a powerful hold on nonwhite voters. African Americans routinely vote Democratic by huge margins; 95 percent cast ballots for President Barack Obama, and on average 88 percent have voted for Democratic candidates since 1964, the year Lyndon Johnson guided the Civil Rights Act through Congress. Over the past decade, Latinos have also become a reliably Democratic constituency; 67 percent voted for Obama, and 60 percent supported Democrats in the 2010 congressional elections, when Republicans triumphed otherwise. Asian Americans are only a bit less enthusiastic about the Democrats.
 
At the same time that Democrats won the overwhelming support of African Americans, white voters began to make a corresponding shift into the Republican Party. With the help of racist appeals to the former Confederacy (the “Southern Strategy”), Republicans built on their advantage with white voters to earn a decisive share of their support. In 1972, Richard Nixon won nearly 70 percent of white voters, and in 1984, Ronald Reagan won 64 percent of whites. In the last decade of presidential elections, Republicans have won, on average, 56 percent of the white vote. If whites were the only people who voted in presidential elections, Democrats could not win.

For many Democratic activists, Obama’s surprising 2008 wins in Virginia, Indiana, Colorado, and North Carolina proved that the party can now win toss-up states with high support and turnout from minorities. As the nonwhite population grows, Democrats are expected to win national elections as long as they keep a healthy portion of the white vote. If Republicans represent the ethnic majority of today’s America, then Democrats represent tomorrow’s—a coalition of black, brown, and Asian Americans, along with liberal and moderate whites, that will become the “permanent majority” that Karl Rove once dreamed of for the GOP.

At least that’s the story. In reality, however, it’s not clear that Democrats can count on the inexorable march of demographics to secure a majority. Assimilation and shifting notions of racial identity could change the equation, and political affiliations—to say nothing of parties—can change dramatically over the course of a generation. Adrian Pantoja, a political scientist who studies Latino political behavior and racial politics, is skeptical. “This is all based on the assumption that the GOP is going to continue to be hostile to minority voters,” he says, “and that minorities will continue to identify as minorities or nonwhite.” Neither is certain.

For all of the racial disparities that still characterize the American experience, it’s also true that race is declining in cultural significance. Interracial relationships—romantic or otherwise—are more common than they’ve ever been. In 2010, 15 percent of all new marriages were intermarriages, and 86 percent of Americans approved of them. The large majority of these marriages occurred among whites, Latinos, and Asians: Forty-three percent were between white and Latino partners, while 14 percent were between white and Asian partners.
 
This has profound implications. If whites are the “mainstream” of American life, with overwhelming representation in politics, business, and culture, then intermarriage with Latinos and Asians has the potential to bring those groups into the mainstream as well. Put another way, the wildly popular comedian Louis C.K. is understood to be white, even though his father and grandfather are Mexican and his first language is Spanish. More important, his children will be perceived as white, despite their Latino heritage. In effect, C.K. and others like him are expanding the definition of “white.”
 
To Pantoja, this bears a strong resemblance to the pattern of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the U.S. saw massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. “Latinos seem to be on a similar trajectory as Italians,” he says. “At the turn of the century, the Italians were seen as a stigmatized minority group that could not be assimilated into the American mainstream.” It was common to describe Italians as “dark,” “swarthy,” and—in language that also has characterized African Americans—prone to crime and poverty. But as Italians rose out of working-class professions and joined a burgeoning middle class, they and other “nonwhite” immigrants assimilated. Eventually, the New Deal, along with unions, service in World War II, and the G.I. Bill, brought Italians fully into American life…

Read the entire article here.

President Obama on “The View”

Sojourners: Faith in Action for Social Justice
2010-08-02

Valerie Elverton Dixon
Just Peace Theory

President Obama visited with the five hosts of the ABC daytime talk show “The View.” People complained. He should have gone to the Boy Scout gathering. The office of the presidency ought to be above such a program. These complaints are nonsense. The president ought to speak to his constituents, and the views of “The View” are all people to whom he is accountable.

The women asked interesting questions about the economy, the war, and the Shirley Sherrod episode and what it says about race in America. The president was able to make his case on all of these issues. Barbara Walters asked the president about his personal identity: why he identified as African American rather than as mixed race since his late mother is European American.
 
In my mind the answer to Walter’s question was obvious because President Obama is literally African American, the son of an African father and an American mother. He answered that he identifies as an African American because in the African-American community the reality that we all are mixed race is known and readily accepted. In one family you can find kin that is the blackest of black and the whitest of white. Racial purity is not a concern…

Read the entire article here.

How Is Biracialism Changing America – And The Jewish community?

RepairLabs: Resources and strategies for volunteer engagement and Jewish Service-Learning
2012-02-10

Diane Tobin, President
Institute for Jewish & Community Research

As the parent of a Black Jewish child, I want my son to feel at home in the Jewish community. It seems to me that it is in our self interest to welcome everyone with open arms, yet it occurs to me that we may need to be sensitive to what Alvin Toffler described in the 70’s as “Future Shock”—the stress and disorientation of too much change in too short a time. I wonder how much time is too short? And, what role does race and ethnicity play in being Jewish in America.
 
Jews are part of American life and are affected by social trends. Taboos around interracial and LGBT unions are diminishing, transracial adoption is increasing, and people see being Jewish as one of many identities…

Read the entire article here.

“What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity and the Social Construction of Race in the U.S.

University of North Texas
May 2012
165 pages

Starita Smith

Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation is a qualitative study of racially ambiguous people and their life experiences. Racially ambiguous people are individuals who are frequently misidentified racially by others because they do not resemble the phenotype associated with the racial group to which they belong or because they belong to racial/ethnic groups originating in different parts of the world that resemble each other. The racial/ethnic population of the United States is constantly changing because of variations in the birth rates among the racial/ethnic groups that comprise those populations and immigration from around the world. Although much research has been done that documents the existence of racial/ethnic mixing in the history of the United States and the world, this multiracial history is seldom acknowledged in the social, work, and other spheres of interaction among people in the U.S., instead a racialized system based on the perception of individuals as mono-racial thus easily identified through (skin tone, hair texture, facial features, etc.). This is research was done using life experience interviews with 24 racially ambiguous individuals to determine how race/ethnicity has affected their lives and how they negotiate the minefield of race.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
• CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
  • Research Questions
• CHAPTER 2 REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
  • Changing Definitions of Race
  • Race under European Domination
  • The One-Drop Rule or Hypo-Descent
  • Color Stratification among Blacks
  • Passing as White
  • Challenge to the One-Drop Rule
  • Biracial Identity
  • Racial Classifications have Porous Borders
  • Race as a Sorting Mechanism
  • Tri-Racial Isolate Groups
  • The Case of the Mississippi Choctaw Rejected
  • Racial Misclassification and Native Americans
  • Mixed Race Individuals and Kinship Networks
  • Racial Fusion and the Hispanics
  • The U.S. Census and the Social Construction of Race
• CHAPTER 3 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
  • Racial Formation Theory
  • Assimilation Theory
  • The Latin Americanization Thesis
  • Theoretical Perspectives: Discussion
• CHAPTER 4 METHODS
  • Recruitment
  • Data-Gathering Instruments
  • Interview Locations
  • The Interviewees
  • The Interview Script
  • Reflexivity
• CHAPTER 5 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RACE ENDURES IN A “COLORBLIND SOCIETY”
  • Race in Work and School
  • Family life
  • Romantic and Spousal Relationships
• CHAPTER 6 CONSTANT OBJECTIFICATION
  • Objectification of Native Americans
  • Being Constantly Doubted
• CHAPTER 7 STUBBORN STEREOTYPES
• CHAPTER 8 DEVELOPING AN ADULT CORE RACIAL IDENTITY
  • “We’re All the Same in God’s Eyes, Then How Come I Don’t Look Like You?”
  • Black is Bad
  • Making up Your own Racial Identity
• CHAPTER 9 NAVIGATING THE RACIAL LANDSCAPE: THE MULTIFOCAL RACIAL IDENTITY
  • Pride in Minority Identity
  • Learning to be Resilient
  • Being Flexible under Globalization
• CHAPTER 10 HURTFUL LIVES
• CHAPTER 11 THEORY REVISITED
• CHAPTER 12 CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX A CONSENT FORM
• APPENDIX B INTERVIEWEE PHOTO INSTRUMENT
• REFERENCE LIST

LIST OF TABLES

1. Interviewee Demographic Data
2. Thematic Codingg
3. Sample of Thematic Coding for Indira

LIST OF FIGURES

1. Racialized society
2. Objectification of racially ambiguous people
3. Adult core racial identity

Read the entire dissertation here.

“Chino-Chicano”: A Biblical Framework for Diversity (Part I)

Jesus for Revolutionaries: A Blog About Race, Social Justice, and Christianity
2013-01-03

Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

I’m a “Chino-Chicano.” I was born in East Los Angeles and raised in the small town of Hacienda Heights. My dad is an immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico and my mom an immigrant from Hubei in central China. The Romeros lost their family fortune during the Mexican Revolution by siding with Pancho Villa, and eventually immigrated to El Paso, Texas. They moved to East Los Angeles in the 1950’s and we’ve been here in Southern California ever since. My mom’s family immigrated to Los Angeles from China via Hong Kong and Singapore in the 1950’s. My maternal grandfather, Calvin Chao, was a famous pastor in China who launched the first Chinese branch of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. The Chaos fled their native land because my grandfather was on a communist “hit list.” As an interesting side note, my Mom’s family traces directly back to the founding emperor of the Song Dynasty!

Growing up “mixed,” I had a lot of struggles with racial identity. I was very proud of my Mexican heritage, but at a young age got sent the message that being Chinese was a bad thing. On the first day of first grade a kid walked up to me, pretended to hold an imaginary refrigerator in his hands, and said, “Here’s a refrigerator, open it up. Here’s a coke, drink it. Me Chinese, me play joke, me do pee-pee in your Coke.” Kids are so mean.  I was so scarred by that event that I denied my Chinese heritage for the next 18 years.  Once I even remember telling a friend that my mom was our housekeeper because I was embarrassed that she came to pick me up from school…

Read the entire article here.

Catching Up With Black in America’s Soledad O’Brien

Clutch Magazine
2012-12-14

Zettler Clay

A while ago, I took my little cousins to Toys “R” Us. Three of them. 8 years old, 6 years old, 4 years old. It was going smoothly enough until we came across a row of dolls.

There were two on the end. A fully-adorned Black doll on the left. A fully-adorned white doll on the right. She picked the one on the right.

My radar immediately went off. I gently suggested the melanated doll.

No dice. I strongly suggested this doll. Nothing. We weren’t getting anywhere and I was met with the confused look of a little girl whose older cousin had a problem with what she wanted. After he said she could get what she wanted.

I was short on time. She was short on understanding. So I relented.

I haven’t been able to shake this experience. The notion of colorism — the lighter the skin, the better the “doll” — hits us early in life and never leaves. It’s endemic in our community, a point brought to the surface by CNN’s latest addition to the Black in America series, Who is Black in America?

“It’s nothing wrong with seeing color,” said CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien. “It becomes a problem when people limit and define you by it.”…

…Classification creates forms. Forms create separateness, which leads to competition. Colonization. And a wondering lot of people left to discover who they are because of who they’re not.

But why the focus on defining minorities? What about a White in America? It is this criticism that O’Brien hears. And agrees with…

For a few candid moments, I caught up with O’Brien about defining “blackness,” future of Black in America, white supremacy’s effects on Black women and self-identification.

Me: This is a huge subject to tackle.

Soledad O’Brien: You think! (laughs)…

Me: How much has this series helped in your self-identification?

SO: I’ve always had a very strong self-identification. I’ve never struggled with my racial classification. I was very lucky. My mom used to always tell me, “don’t let anyone tell you you’re not Black. Don’t let anybody tell you you’re not Latino.” My parents instilled a very strong sense of identity. Even in the recent doc as I was talking to the young women, I kept thinking, “this is soooo not my experience.” I found that other people had many more challenges about racial ambiguity. I find it fascinating to learn about different communities and geographic history. Black people in Atlanta vs. Black people in Minneapolis (where we’re shooting now). Black people in Philly vs. Black people in New York. Just the history of these communities. I have found it rewarding to see the differences in us and how similar we are…

Read the entire interview here.

Forging People: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought

University of Notre Dame Press
2011
376 pages
ISBN 10: 0-268-02982-2
ISBN 13: 978-0-268-02982-1

Edited by:

Jorge J. E. Gracia, Samuel P. Capen Chair; SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature
State University of New York, Buffalo

Forging People explores the way in which Hispanic American thinkers in Latin America and Latino/a philosophers in the United States have posed and thought about questions of race, ethnicity, and nationality, and how they have interpreted the most significant racial and ethnic labels used in Hispanic America in connection with issues of rights, nationalism, power, and identity. Following the first introductory chapter, each of the essays addresses one or more influential thinkers, ranging from Bartolomé de Las Casas on race and the rights of Amerindians; to Simón Bolívar’s struggle with questions of how to forge a nation from disparate populations; to modern and contemporary thinkers on issues of race, unity, assimilation, and diversity. Each essay carefully and clearly presents the views of key authors in their historical and philosophical context and provides brief biographical sketches and reading lists, as aids to students and other readers.

Contents

• Contributors
  Preface
• 1. Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Hispanic A merican and Latino/a Thought—Jorge J. E. Gracia
• Part I. The Colony and Scholasticism
  • 2. The New Black Legend of Bartolomé de Las Casas: Race and Personhood—Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey
• Part II. Independence and the Enlightenment
  • 3. Men or Citizens? The Making of Bolívar’s Patria—José Antonio Aguilar Rivera
  • 4. Andrés Bello: Race and National Political Culture—Iván Jaksica
  • 5. Undoing “Race”: Martí’s Historical Predicament—Ofelia Schutte
• Part III. New Nations and Positivism
  • 6. Sarmiento on Barbarism, Race, and Nation Building—Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey
  • 7. Justo Sierra and the Forging of a Mexican Nation—Oscar R. Martí
• Part IV. Challenges in the Twentieth Century
  • 8. Rodó, Race, and Morality—Arleen Salles
  • 9. Zarathustra Criollo: Vasconcelos on Race—Diego von Vacano
  • 10. The Amauta’s Ambivalence: Mariátegui on Race—Renzo Llorente
  • 11. Mestizaje, mexicanidad, and Assimilation: Zea on Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality—Amy A. Oliver
• Part V. Latinos/as in the United States
  • 12. Latino/a Identity and the Search for Unity: Alcoff, Corlett, and Gracia—Elizabeth Millán and Ernesto Rosen Velásquez
  • Bibliography
  • Index

Preface

The discussion of race in the United States reflects to a great extent the situation in the country. The adoption of the one-drop rule, according to which anyone who has a drop of black blood is considered black, has too often been taken for granted, resulting in a polarization that characterizes both the formulation of problems related to race and the purported solutions to those problems: a person is either black or white but not both; there is no in between. It also has tended to move to the background the visible dimensions of race and to pay undue attention to biological and genetic conceptions of it; heredity, rather than appearance, has often been regarded as most significant. Finally, it has contributed to the widespread use of the metaphor of purity associated with whites and of impurity associated with blacks: to be white is to be uncontaminated, whereas to be black is to be contaminated. That a mixture is generally different from the elements that compose it but partakes of them, that races involve gradation and fuzzy boundaries, and that visible appearance plays an important role in racial classifications are facts too often neglected.

This model of race takes insufficient note of what much of the world thinks and illustrates the insularity that characterizes some segments of the U.S. community. Indeed, it is seldom that proper attention is paid to the views of other societies. Although the views on race of some European philosophers, such as Kant and Hume, have been studied in some detail, treatments by Latin Americans or Africans, for example, are generally ignored by North American philosophers concerned with race.

The inadequacy of this parochial approach becomes clear when one considers how conceptions of race vary from place to place. In Cuba, for example, to be black entails a certain kind of appearance. A person who appears to have mixed black-white ancestry is not usually considered black or white but mulatto. In the United States, according to the one-drop rule, to be black requires only one black ancestor, even if physical appearance tells another story. But in Cuba persons of mixed black and white ancestry who look white are generally taken as white, whereas those who appear black are considered black. Clearly the criteria of racial classification used in the United States and Cuba are different. Similar differences can be found between the views of race in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

This neglect of points of view in other parts of the world also applies to ethnicity and nationality. Societies differ substantially in how they establish and think about ethnicity or nationality. Some societies use skin color and physical appearance to establish ethnic and national distinctions; others use lineage or culture. Indian is a racial term generally associated with ancestry in the United States, but in some contexts in South America it is used to refer to culture: to be an Indian indicates that one has not adopted the ways of Europeans, thus carrying with it the disparaging connotations that this entails in the eyes of those who are European or have adopted European culture. Nationality is taken in some cases to be a legal marker—whether involving birthplace or ancestry—and in others to be an indicator of kinship, race, or culture. As in the United States, in some parts of Latin America blacks and mulattoes were denied citizenship because of their race or racial mixture, whereas in other parts of that region it was denied on other grounds, including culture.

Considering these differences in conception, it would seem to make sense that theories of race, ethnicity, and nationality need to take into account as many of the various ways in which different societies use these notions as possible. But the tendency in the United States has been to concentrate on Western European views. This has resulted in inadequate theories, based on cultural and social biases. If U.S. thinking is to make any progress toward an understanding of these phenomena, it needs to go beyond parochial boundaries and consider other societies where race, ethnicity, and nationality also play important roles. How are these notions used in the East, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America?

Latin America is especially important because it is the place where Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans first came together in substantial numbers. Indeed, some scholars have made the argument that the concept of race in particular developed in the context of the encounters between these peoples in the sixteenth century. The details of the story have still to be worked out, but one thing is clear: Latin America is significant in this development. And the significance is not restricted to the fact that Latin America is a meeting place of Europeans, Amerindians, and Africans; it involves also the complex subsequent history of racial, ethnic, and national mixture in the region. Scholars who have studied the pertinent populations do not tire of repeating that Latin America is one of the places in the world where mixing has been most prevalent…

Read the Preface and Chapter 1 here.

The Moment of Theory: Race as Myth and Medium

W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture Series
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
Harvard University
2010-04-20

W. J. T. Mitchell, Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History
University of Chicago

Watch the lecture here.

The Myth of Race

Argo-Navis
2012-11-27
154 pages
8.2 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
Paperback ISBN-10: 0786754362; ISBN-13: 978-0786754366

Jefferson M. Fish, Professor Emeritus of Psychology
St. John’s University, New York City

The Myth of Race deals concisely with a wide range of topics, from how the concept of race differs in different cultures and race relations in the United States, to IQ tests and the census. It draws on scientific knowledge to topple a series of myths that pass as facts, correct false assumptions, and clarify cultural misunderstandings about the highly charged topic of race. The book demonstrates that the apparently straightforward concept of race is actually a confused mixture of two different concepts; and the confusion often leads to miscommunication. The first concept, biological race, simply doesn’t exist in the human species. Instead, what exists is gradual variation in what people look like (e.g., skin color and facial features) and in their genes, as you travel around the planet—with more distant populations appearing more different than closer ones. If you travel in different directions, the populations look different in different ways. The second concept, social race, is a set of cultural categories for labeling people based on how their ancestors were classified, selected aspects of what they look like, or various combinations of both. These sets of categories vary widely from one culture to another.

The book draws on scientific knowledge to topple a series of myths that pass as facts, correct false assumptions, and clarify cultural misunderstandings about the highly charged topic of race.

Here are some of those myths:

• The myth that humans are divided into Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid races
• The myth that people cannot change their race
• The myth of the tragic mulatto
• The myth of biologically based differences in intelligence among the races

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. The Myth of Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid Races
• 2. The Myth that a Persons Race Cannot Change
• 3. Racial Myths and Cultural Misunderstandings
• 4. Racial Myths in the Census
• 5. Racial Myths and the Authors Family
• 6. Myths about Race and Intelligence
• 7. Dreams from My Daughter: Mixed Race Myths
• 8. How the Myth of Race Took Hold