Mixed Race Studies

Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America [Eisenberg Review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 5 (May 2013)
pages 923-925
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.748214

Martin Eisenberg
Department of Urban Studies
Queens College, City University of New York

Jennifer Hochschild, Vesla Weaver and Tract Burch. Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2012. xii + 260 pp.

In this book. Hochschild, Weaver and Burch contend that the USA is on the cusp of a democratic transformation of its racial order On the basis of survey data and demographic analyses, they are struck by the increasing heterogeneity and interactions across differences that have developed over the last two decades. Whether a democratic transformation occurs depends upon new policies that make it possible to overcome the obstacles that arc part of the old racial order. There are no certainties, but the authors arc optimistic that major “ethno-racial” boundaries will continue to blur in the near future.

The authors believe that the social forces generating the possibility of change in the racial order are immigration, multiraiialism, genomics, and the current, equalitarian cohort of young adults, all interacting with one another, and underlain by demographic and legal changes. Immigration and multiracialism contribute to blurring the traditional categories of racial difference. Nearly 50 million Latino, Caribbean Asian and African immigrants have settled in the USA since 1970. Some immigrant groups bring with them their own racial categories, and the children of some of these groups intermarry and have children at relatively high rates with whites. The authors see multiracialism as a political movement, and as a public identity. Some Americans have succeeded in asserting the legal right to identify as ‘multiracial’, not just as a single race on the US Census and other official documents. Also, multiracialism generates variations in how people identify in different situations. And, surveys show that young adults possess more democratic attitudes and interact across difference with more frequency, in ways less governed by stereotypes, and without the conflicts of the past in their collective memories.

According to the authors, genomics is the branch of genetics that studies organisms in terms of full DNA sequences. Its goal is mainly medical to discover genes and genomic interactions that cause disease and to develop effective medications. Scientists have confirmed that all human beings share 99.9% of their genetic makeup: that about 94%. of all physical variation lies within the ‘so-called’ racial groups; and that there is much overlapping of genes and phenotypes in neighbouring populations. Yet, despite the overlapping and blurring of boundaries around groups, some concepts like race or ethnicity or bio-geographic ancestry remain useful for genomic purposes to designate clusters of genes. Genomic science answers the question, ‘what is race?’ ambiguously. It thoroughly undermines the older conception of a few biologically distinct and internally homogeneous races. But it also undermines the claim that race, defined genetically, is merely arbitrary. Genomically, the authors write, races are simultaneously real, arbitrary, heterogeneous, and blurred, so it is not surprising that individual classifications are intricate and confused. And, it will continue that way until it becomes possible lo avoid racial classifications by testing for alleles and developing treatments for the genetic components of diseases among individuals. Until those procedures are developed, the authors predict continued contentiousness among biological scientists on how to conceptualize race…

Read or purchase the review here.

Mixed race children and young people are individual nation states. They defy classification

The Independent
2012-12-012

Shyama Perea

This week we learned that the number of mixed race people in the UK has doubled to 1.2 million. I’m adding my children to the arsenal of weapons for change

n the late 1940s, the Eurasian poet Cedric Dover wrote a poem about his racial identity. Entitled The Brown Phoenix, it includes the lines: I am tomorrow’s man/ Offering to share/Love, and the difficult quest,/In the emerging plan.

How fitting that in the week that a post-war musical, Privates on Parade, opened with a Eurasian love interest—“Welsh Bombay”—rejected on the grounds of her colour, we learn that in the 2011 census, the number of mixed-race people in the UK has doubled to 1.2 million. On the same day, the On the same day, the think-tank British Future reported that only 15 per cent of people oppose mixed-race relationships. Among the under-25s, that drops to under 5 per cent. British Future calls it The Melting Pot Generation. The Sun proudly declared: “We Are the World.”

Should we be surprised by this after a summer of sporting magic in which so many British Olympians, including the poster girl Jessica Ennis, were golden-hued – an event masterminded by Lord Coe whose father is white English and mother Indian? London has a mayor with a mixed-race wife. Half the X Factor contestants, from Leona Lewis to Marvin and Aston from JLS and this year’s Jahmene Douglas, have black fathers and white mothers. The one thing – possibly the only thing –that Rupert Murdoch and Vince Cable have in common is mixed-race children…

Read the entire article here.

Who are we? Census 2011 reports on ethnicity in the UK

Runnymede Trust: Intelligence for a multi-ethnic Britain
2012-12-11

Dr. Omar Khan, Head of Policy Research

Every ten years the Census provides us with multiple insights into the state of modern Britain. In today’s release of the 2011 Census, we find that the Black and minority ethnic (BME) population has reached nearly 8 million – roughly the population of Scotland and Wales combined.

Overall, the BME population is now 14.1% of the overall total in England and Wales, rising from 7.9% in 2001. This doesn’t include the significant ‘White Other’ population which is now 2.5 million, or 4.4% of the overall population. Much of this growth has been through immigration, and many will assume that the ‘White Other’ population is primarily Eastern European. However, this population also includes White French, White Australian, White Argentinian and White American people, which explains why this disparate ‘group’ is now some 12.6% of the population of London.

Combined with the 40% of the population that is Black and minority ethnic, a minority of London’s residents are now ‘White British’ (46%). While this is indeed a striking development, it masks an arguably more significant development – the greater dispersal of ethnic minorities across the UK. Contrary to much received wisdom, Britain is becoming less ‘segregated’ every year.

Between 2001 and 2011, the regions whose BME population has grown the fastest are those that had the fewest ethnic minorities in 2011. So Wales, the North East and South West have all doubled their proportion of BME people (from just over 2% to over 4%), while London and West Midlands, which had the most BME people in 2001, have grown the slowest. There are more BME people living across the UK, including in villages and the countryside, and this phenomenon can be expected to continue.

One of the striking findings of the census is the reduction in the overall number of ‘White British’ people by over half a million people. So one reason the BME proportion of the population is rising is because the White British population is shrinking. In most regions of England and Wales this decrease or growth was actually quite minimal (with the White British population growing by more than 2% over the decade only in the South East), but London was notable because there were 600,000 fewer White British people living there in 2011 compared to 2001. This clearly points to the phenomenon of White British people leaving the capital, and explains much of the rise in London’s proportion of BME people…

…Inevitably much coverage of the census will focus on the rising ‘Mixed’ population, which now is the second largest, at some 1.2 million people. While the rise in the number of people categorized as mixed has been quite remarkable, so too has the overall BME growth, meaning that the ‘Mixed’ population is only 1% more (15.6%) of the total BME population than it was in 2001 (14.6%)…

…On most social outcome measures, the ‘Mixed’ population shows enormous variation, with Black Caribbean-White and Black African-White people more likely to have outcomes similar to Black people generally. In other words, rather than viewing the ‘mixed’ population as a single group with shared social experiences, we should rather focus on the continued salience of race, and in particular how the racial background of parents affects the social outcomes of children…

…It is also significant that many of these categories have large and growing populations. This raises the final important question – how identity shifts over people’s lifetimes and indeed across generations. While the overall share of Black people within the BME population remained about a quarter, there was a sharp decrease in the proportion who identified as ‘Black Caribbean’. However, the ‘Black Other’ group saw the steepest rise, suggesting that some children of Black Caribbean parents are happier with this ethnic identity.

Depending on how identity and social experiences change, we might expect further development of the current census categories. For example, the children of White Polish parents may plausibly identify as ‘White British’, as many of the grandchildren of Irish and Italian migrants now do, while many ‘Mixed’ people may rather identify as one of their parents. Here it’s worth emphasizing again the importance of social experiences and social outcomes in understanding race and ethnicity. That Barack Obama self-identifies as African American rather than ‘Mixed’ has probably little to do with a rejection of his mother’s heritage or a radical kind of separatist politics. Rather, Obama’s identity is informed by his social experience, and the reality of racism is evidenced not simply in his experiences in the 1970s or 1980s, but in the continued focus on his place of birth and by the fact that over 90% of White American voters in Mississippi and Alabama voted for his opponent.

So while it is important to understand self-identification in thinking about race and ethnicity, people cannot simply choose an identity of their own making, nor can they escape the views and prejudices in others in navigating the world. In the UK, the unemployment rate for Black young men is now 55%, Chinese graduates with better results have lower earnings than their White colleagues and Black and Asian women face such difficult experiences in the labour market that some of them change their names on their CVs…

Read the entire article here.

“Mongrel nation”: How is the face of Britain seen now?

British Future
2012-12-10

Shamit Saggar, Professor of Political Science
University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom

Twenty years ago Time magazine put a composite photograph on its front cover. It was generated by an IBM 486 computer and fused together the phenotypical features of the world’s six main racial groups. The face that emerged was that of a woman with a striking, yet blended, appearance. The purpose was to sneak preview a mid-twentieth century future in which growing global migration and cross marriage would produce Global Woman, writes Shamit Saggar, professor of political science at the University of Sussex.

Many younger people in Britain today would, if scientifically surveyed, probably acknowledge her beauty. A fair slice would perhaps welcome what she represented. But a distinctive group—a minority, I guess—would be alarmed, sensing that something with value had, or was being, lost…

Read the entire article here.

The melting pot generation: How Britain became more relaxed on race

British Future
2012-12-12
26 pages

Rob Ford, Lecturer in Politics
University of Manchester

Rachael Jolley, Editorial Director and Director of Communications
British Future

Sunder Katwala, Director
British Future

Binita Mehta, Intern
British Future

As the 2011 census results show an ever larger number of Britons from mixed race backgrounds, this new British Future report The Melting Pot Generation: How Britain became more relaxed about race examines how these changes might affect the way that we think about race and identity.

When the parents of Olympic champion Jessica Ennis, who are from Jamaica and Derbyshire, met in Sheffield in the 1980s, a majority of the public expressed opposition to mixed race relationships. In 2012, concern has fallen to 15%—and just one in twenty of those aged 18–24. Jessica Ennis is from a generation that worry less about race and mixing than their parents did, and who mostly see mixed Britain as the everyday norm that they grew up with.

Inside this report…

• Rob Ford of the University of Manchester traces how the rise of mixed Britain changed attitudes over recent decades;
• Rachael Jolley explores new Britain Thinks polling on what we think about race and relationships today.
• New Oxford University research reports how media coverage of Olympic medal winners Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah balanced their ethnic origins and local identities.
• Binita Mehta selects ten twenty-something stars who reflect the changing face of their generation.
• Andrew Gimson talks to young Britons about how far being mixed race mattered to their experience of growing up.
• Leading thinkers assess the opportunities and pitfalls of changing how we talk about race.
• Sunder Katwala wonders if his children’s generation will see racial identity as increasingly a matter of choice.

Read the entire report here.

CNN’s Who’s Black in America: Some Thoughts

Is That Your Child? Thought in Full Color
2012-12-12

Michelle Clark-McCrary

So here’s an audio journal with my reflections on last Sunday night’s CNN Who’s Black in America special. Ultimately, my view of this special and the entire series as a whole is that conversations about race cannot happen without first directly addressing, defining, and recognizing whiteness. If whiteness/white supremacy are not central to your examination of racial identity and racial identity formation, then the conversation will inevitably lay the issues and outcomes of racial inequality at the feet of nonwhite people. I think this is what happened on Sunday night and I think that’s what happened with the series as a whole. The space of commercial cable news in many ways is no friend to nuance or complexity and that the commercial motivations of these outlets somehow impact their willingness to “say white.”…

Listen to the audio journal here.

Mixed-race Britain: Proud of both sides and here to stay

The Daily Mail
Lindsay John’s blog
2012-12-11

Lindsay John

According to data from last year’s census, revealed today, Britain’s mixed-race population probably now exceeds one million. Moreover, the mixed-race population is among the fastest growing in Britain and is already the largest ethnic group among under-16s.

Introduced onto the census form in 2001, the mixed-race category was at the time somewhat controversial, seen as a ‘divide and conquer’ mechanism by old school, anti-racism campaigners, but is now widely accepted as a very useful and apposite tool for reflecting and describing the manifold complexities of race and personal identity.

What do these intriguing census results say about Britain today, the way we now perceive ethnicity and the progress we have made as a nation with regards to race? As a person of mixed race myself (with a Coloured South African father, a white English mother and proud of both sides), I feel I am in a fairly good position to comment…

Read the entire article here.

Coming Clean About Blackness, Mixed Race Identity and the Multiracial Movement

Is That Your Child? Thought in Full Color
2012-12-10

Michelle Clark-McCrary

Before I go into my reflections on CNN’s “Who’s Black in America” series, I have to come clean about the evolution of my personal perspective on blackness, mixed race identity and the “multiracial movement.” Over that last three years, I’ve been trying to develop a deeper, more nuanced understanding of race-particularly as it relates to how my marriage, motherhood, and my daughter fit within the historical continuum of our racialized society. Part of my process has to do with balancing my emotional, gut responses to race/racism with my contemplative, critical responses to race/racism. To be clear, there is room for both responses to simultaneously coexist. I’m a firm believer in trusting one’s instinctual, emotional responses, while at the same time interrogating and rounding out those responses with more rational, contemplative thought…

…As my critical contemplative response tempered my emotional one, I saw that the antiblack bias at the core of many multiracial organizations had shaped the larger discourse of mixedness and multiracial identity. While many mixed individuals and organizations are engaged and invested in social justice, discussions about mixed identity the realm of popular culture and mass media tend to frame the presence of black ancestry as a hindrance. While I believe that there is a definite mixed experience, I think that care must be taken not to cleave that experience from the broader historical continuum of how race has been constructed and reconstructed in America and that any analysis of race/identity must begin with defining whiteness and how the construction of whiteness has directly impacted the construction of all other identities in this country. As parents of black/white mixed kids and black/nonwhite mixed kids, we have to address the ways in which we’ve all internalized messages of antiblack bias and how that affects both the identity choices we make for our children and the ones we want them to make for themselves. For those outside the realm of the black/white/black/nonwhite mix, it’s still important to consider how antiblack bias relates to your child’s particular identity construction and how the historical black/white mixed binary informs how all mixed/multiracial identities are understood in our society…

Read the entire article here.

Shame on CNN: A commentary by Susan Graham

Project RACE
2012-12-10

Susan Graham, Executive Director

CNN aired a show hosted by Soledad O’Brien Sunday called “Who is Black in America?” I have been disgusted with the public misunderstanding of multiracial people on so called news shows in the past, but this one wins the prize for the absolute worst.

First, let’s not forget that Soledad O’Brien is an entertainer and not an authority on the news. Her game is simple: ratings. She does not believe that people get to choose their own identities. But neither she nor anyone else should ever question someone’s racial self-identification.

O’Brien’s mother is black and her father is white; her mother told her not to let anyone tell her she’s not black. So she self identifies as only black, denying half of her identity. She has that right and that opportunity. I feel that everyone should clearly have the right and opportunity to choose to be multiracial, too. But she has clearly brought her identity into her job this time…

…This CNN special tells the story of several multiracial people who identify only as black, and are coerced into identifying as black to be on the national news. Some “experts” are thrown in who simply are getting free publicity for their books or are holding on to their academic jobs by writing and talking about the advantages of self-identifying as black if you happen to be unfortunate enough to have been born to parents of different races…

…This show is, in my opinion, the most misguided show in the CNN “race” series to date. It’s a propaganda piece for every multiracial person to identify only as black; they should not even have a choice. Ms. O’Brien even tries to completely nullify multiracial advocacy by stating that you may only choose one race on the US Census. That statement has been absolutely untrue since the 2000 US Census…

…There are plenty of people who will publicly—on the Internet anyway—applaud Ms. O’Brien for whatever reason and it will give them a chance to spout more hate against the multiracial movement, Project RACE, and me. I’m used to it after 23 years of fighting for the rights of multiracial people who wish to embrace their entire heritage. What is more recent is the new hatred against white people who are being blamed for what happened so many years ago and who fostered the civil rights movement…

Read the entire article here.

Black (Or Not) Like Me: Thoughts on CNN’s Black in America 5

The Huffington Post
2012-12-10

Smokey Fontaine, Chief Content Officer
Interactive One

I know who my colleagues think I am. I’m pretty sure they’ve accepted me as the lightest Black dude in the office. My job demands that I constantly engage co-workers around racial issues, so I have opportunities to represent my Black experience all the time which I’m sure gains me some points.

But it’s different in the street. My what-is-he? scorecard for strangers who pass me by in New York City is as follows:

• 60 percent think I’m Latino
• 25 percent think I’m Black or interracial
• 15 percent think I’m White

Pretty good percentages for me because I’m only comfortable when my see-me-as-a-person-of-color index is above half. That was my problem in Baltimore. Living there for a few years to teach sixth grade at Booker T. Washington Middle School made me vulnerable to mis-identification in a southern environment without a significant Latino population. My white quotient jumped to above 50…

…CNN’s latest installment of their top-rated Black In America series handles these complex issues of identity, asking young African-Americans of various shades and backgrounds to discuss their experience. First, I’m surprised that it took them so long to address this topic (especially given series hostess Soledad O’Brien’s interracial heritage), but I was most struck by how the young people’s experiences were so similar to mine and those of my (not all-Black) friends 20 years ago. It was like I was watching a video of a college I-Pride meeting from 1995.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Every generation’s naivete drives their passion to figure out the world and clearly the show’s goal is to raise more questions than it answers. But as cultural critic Stuart Hall liked to say, “cultural identity is one of becoming as well as being. Like everything which is historical… [identities] undergo constant transformation” and I didn’t feel that in the show.

There is a cultural upheaval going on in our country that is expanding ideas about Blackness. Latino, Asian and even white identity are also being affected (don’t get it twisted: the identity of caucausian culture is as dependent on people of color as the other way around). But this shift was not loudly represented by all the great young folks in Black In America talking about how they see and socialize themselves…

…What I’ve learned is that when there is a gap between how someone feels about themselves and how they’re perceived by others, you get conflict. Even within my own interracial family, there are darker-skinned folks who take on their Italian maiden name as an homage to the white mother that raised them (and a dis to the Black father who didn’t), and lighter-skinned folks who refuse to ever straighten their hair to avoid any more obvious connections to a European heritage…

Read the entire article here.