Mixed Race Studies

Covering Multiracial America Requires Historical Perspective

Maynard Media Center on Structural Inequity
Maynard Institute
2012-11-14

Nadra Kareem Nittle

Although people of mixed races have lived in the United States for centuries, authorities on multiracial identity say mainstream media continue to report on these people as if they are a new phenomenon.

In 1619, the first slaves were brought to Britain’s North American colonies. The following year, says Audrey Smedley, professor emerita of anthropology and African American studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, the first “mulatto” child was born. Thus, mixed-race people have a long history in this country, disproving the notion often mentioned today that miscegenation will somehow magically cure racism.

Most major stereotypes about multiracial people in America historically involved individuals whose heritage was black and white or Native American and white. Such people were largely thought to yearn for the same advantages as whites but found them off-limits because of the “one-drop rule,” which originated in the South and mandated that just a drop of black blood meant they were of color.

In the 21st century, newer stereotypes about multiracial people have gained popularity. Rainier Spencer, founder and director of the Afro-American Studies Program and senior adviser to the president at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, says contemporary media coverage of mixed-race people isn’t filled with tragic mulattoes but with docile symbols of a colorblind America yet to reach fruition.

“Multiracial people are infantilized,” Spencer says. “They [the media] don’t treat them as fully capable agents. Mixed-race people are quiet and happy, and they don’t complain. They’re our postracial future.”

Spencer, author of “Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix,” cautions that these notions are dangerous. The stereotype that multiracial people represent a bridge between races that will soon eradicate bigotry ignores the fact that such people were in North America more than a century before U.S. independence and that racism remains a reality.

This idea also lets the establishment off the hook, he says. “If mixed-race people are going to take us to a postracial destiny, then the power structure doesn’t have to worry about it. It’s very convenient.”…

…In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau permitted declaring more than one race on census forms. In the subsequent decade, several published articles reported that the mixed-race population was increasing, especially among young people.

But Heidi W. Durrow, who grew up as the only daughter of an African-American father and a Danish mother, would like to see news stories about multiracial people that don’t revolve around census figures…

…Laura Kina, a founding member of the Critical Mixed Race Studies biennial conference and associate professor of Art, Media and Design at DePaul University, has similar concerns. She considers the idea that mixed-race people are new to be a stereotype. “They go back a very long ways,” she says.

Kina is the daughter of an Okinawan father from Hawaii and a Spanish-Basque/Anglo mother, according to her website…

…Dominique DiPrima, host of Los Angeles radio show “The Front Page,” takes issue with the concept of multiracialism because she disputes the concept of race. “I think the media should differentiate between culture, ethnicity and race,” says DiPrima, daughter of Italian-American poet Diane di Prima and African-American writer Amiri Baraka…

Read the entire article here.

Paradigm Lost: Race, Ethnicity, and the Search for a New Population Taxonomy

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 91, Number 7 (July 2001)
pages 1049-1056
DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.91.7.1049

Gerald M. Oppenheimer, Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences
Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) recently recommended that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reevaluate its employment of “race,” a concept lacking scientific or anthropological justification, in cancer surveillance and other population research. The IOM advised the NIH to use a different population classification, that of “ethnic group,” instead of “race.” A relatively new term, according to the IOM, “ethnic group” would turn research attention away from biological determinism and toward a focus on culture and behavior.

This article examines the historically central role of racial categorization and its relationship to racism in the United States and questions whether dropping “race” from population taxonomies is either possible or, at least in the short run, preferable. In addition, a historical examination of “ethnicity” and “ethnic group” finds that these concepts, as used in the United States, derive in part from race and immigration and are not neutral terms; instead, they carry their own burden of political, social, and ideological meaning.

Read the entire article here.

Strange Fruit: Dr. Yaba Blay’s (1)ne Drop Project; Director Kenny Leon

WFPL 89.3 FM
Louisville, Kentucky
2012-11-03

Laura Ellis, Producer

Who is black? That’s the question the (1)ne Drop Project seeks to answer. The project, created by Dr. Yaba Blay, features photographs of people who identify as black, African-American, biracial, and other identities—but whose physical appearances may provoke curiosity, or even disbelief, in strangers. Dr. Blay will appear on CNN’s Black in America 5 to talk about what it means to be black. But this week she made some time to talk to us about her work…

Listen to the interview here (00:38.42). (The interview with Dr. Blay begins at 00:14:54 and ends at 00:26:01).

“At This Defining Moment”: Barack Obama’s Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race

New York University Press
October 2011
229 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780814752975
Paperback ISBN: 9780814752982

Enid Lynette Logan, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

In January 2009, Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States.  In the weeks and months following the election, as in those that preceded it, countless social observers from across the ideological spectrum commented upon the cultural, social and political significance of “the Obama phenomenon.” In “At this Defining Moment,” Enid Logan provides a nuanced analysis framed by innovative theoretical insights to explore how Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy both reflected and shaped the dynamics of race in the contemporary United States.

Using the 2008 election as a case study of U.S. race relations,  and based on a wealth of empirical data that includes an analysis of over 1,500 newspaper articles, blog postings, and other forms of public speech collected over a 3 year period, Logan claims that while race played a central role in the 2008 election, it was in several respects different from the past. Logan ultimately concludes that while the selection of an individual African American man as president does not mean that racism is dead in the contemporary United States, we must also think creatively and expansively about what the election does mean for the nation and for the evolving contours of race in the 21st century.  

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: The Landscape of Race in the 21st Century
• 2. Post-race American Triumphalism and the Entrenchment of Colorblind Racial Ideology
• 3. Rooted in the Black Community but Not Limited to It: The Perils and Promises of the New Politics of Race
• 4. Contesting Gender and Race in the 2008 Democratic Primary
• 5. The Trope of Race in Obama’s America
• 6. Asian and Latino Voters in the 2008 Election: The Politics of Color in the Racial Middle
• 7. In Defense of the White Nation: The Modern Conservative Movement and the Discourse of Exclusionary Nationalism
• 8. Racial Politics under the First Black President
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author

Left of Black S3:E9 | Racial Passing and the Rise of Multiracialism

Left of Black
John Hope Franklin Center
Duke University
2012-11-12

Mark Anthony Neal, Host and Professor of African & African American Studies
Duke University

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Southern California, Annenberg

Habiba Ibrahim, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington

Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

For many African Americans, the practice of ‘Passing’—where light-skinned Blacks could pass for White—remains a thing connected to a difficult racial past. In her new book, Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity (Baylor University Press), Marcia Dawkins, a professor in the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California provides a fresh take on the practice arguing that passing in the contemporary moment transcends racial performance.

Dawkins talks about her new book with Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal, via Skype.  Neal is also joined by University of Washington Professor Habiba Ibrahim for part one of a two-part interview about her new book Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press) in which she links the rise of Multiracialism in the 1990s to the maintenance of traditional gender norms.

A Milestone Election

Weekend Reader
Hannah Arendt Center
Bard College
2012-11-09

Roger Berkowitz, Associate Professor of Political Studies, Human Rights, and Philosophy; Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

The re-election of Barack Obama is a milestone. Barack Obama will always be remembered as the first black President of the United States. He will now also be remembered as the first black two-term President, one who was re-elected in spite of nearly 8% unemployment and a feeling of deep unease in society. He is the black President who was re-elected because he seemed, to most Americans, more presidential, more trustworthy, and more likable than his opponent—a white, Mormon, representative of the business elite. Whatever you want to say about this election, it is difficult to deny that the racial politics of the United States have now changed.
 
President Obama’s re-election victory and his distinguished service have made the country a better place. The dream of America as a land of equality and the dream that our people will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character—these dreams, while not realized, are closer to being realized today because of Barack Obama’s presidency and his re-election.
 
There are some who don’t see it that way. There is a map going around comparing the 2012 electoral college vote to the civil war map. It is striking, and it shows with pictorial clarity, that the Republic strongholds today are nearly identically matched with the states of the Confederacy 150 years ago. For some, this is an indictment not only of the Republican Party, but also of the United States. The argument made on Facebook and beyond is that the country is still deeply divided racially; that this election brought out the deep-seated racism underlying the country…

Read the entire article here.

Should people’s ethnicity matter in their medical treatment?

OnCentral
Southern California Public Radio
2012-10-24

José Martinez

Chances are, medical research has found that your ethnicity makes you more likely to have certain conditions or diseases.

For Latinos, it’s diabetes. For black folks, it’s high blood pressure. For white people, it’s cystic fibrosis. For Asian women, it’s osteoporosis.

But one scholar says race-based medical recommendations to patients potentially mislead them about their health risks – and reinforce harmful notions about race at the same time.

That scholar is Sean Valles, an assistant professor of philosophy at Michigan State University in a new paper appearing in Preventive Medicine.

In his paper, Valles agrees that some racial groups are, on average, more prone to certain diseases and conditions than other ethnic groups. But, he says, within each ethnic group are what he calls “islands” of lower risk that shouldn’t go unacknowledged.

He gave a couple of examples. The government recommends that black people eat less salt than other ethnic groups, due to their predisposition for high blood pressure. But Valles notes that foreign-born black people tend to have different lifestyles, and as such have substantially lower rates of heart disease, for which high blood pressure is a risk factor…

…It can be tempting, though, for medical professionals to use any information they have to get an edge on their patients’ ailments. But still, said Dr. Felix Aguilar, the chief medical officer at South Central Family Health Center, “we have to be careful when we use race.”

Aguilar said oftentimes, when people point to ethnicity as a factor in medicine, they’re often conflating it with socioeconomic status.

“Yes, there definitely are genetics involved in a lot of these procedures, but that’s not the whole story,” he said, adding that health providers should ask themselves: “Are we using [ethnicity] for the genetic aspects or are we using it for the socioeconomic aspects?”

If the answer is the latter, said Aguilar, then ethnicity probably doesn’t need to be part of the discussion.

“Our position in society many times tells us how long we’re going to live, how healthy we’re going to be and whether we have access to clean water, clean air and good food,” he said.

“Why do Latina women have the highest rate of cervical cancer in the U.S.?” Aguilar continued. “You can say, ‘Alright, it’s genetic.’ And maybe there’s a genetic element. But most likely it’s access to care.“…

Read the entire article here.

Race Under the Microscope: Biological Misunderstandings of Race

Center for Genetics and Society
2012-05-24

Despite the fact that advances in genetics undermine the notion that discrete and distinct racial groups exist at the biological level, the science of genetics is inadvertently reinforcing the myth that race is a biological, rather than a social, category. In this video, produced by the Center for Genetics and Society, a group of experts discusses the history and consequences of the misuse of racial categories in medicine and science. The video is a great resource for students and educators.

Race Under the Microscope features commentary on the misuse of race from esteemed professors Jonathan Kahn (Professor of Law, Hamline University), Dorothy Roberts (Professor of Law, Northwestern University), Osagie K. Obasogie (Professor of Law, University of California Hastings Law School), and Joseph Graves (Associate Dean for Research, Joint School for Nanosciences & Nanoengineering, Greensboro, NC). The excerpts used in the video were filmed during the 2011 Tarrytown Meeting.

Exhibition brings black Germans’ stories to light

DW
2012-11-09

Helen Whittle

An exhibit gives voice to the histories of Africans, African-Americans and Afro-Germans from the past 300 years of German history. It presents a differentiated perspective on the lives and histories of blacks in Germany.

Asked what comes to mind when they think about Germany, many foreigners conjure up stereotypical images of Oktoberfest, the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall.

But these images of Teutonic culture and society do little to reflect the diversity of the contemporary, multiethnic Federal Republic of Germany where one fifth of the population has an ethnic minority background, according to an exhibition that opened Saturday (3.11.2012) at Cologne’s Alte Feuerwache.

Jonas Behre, director at the Initiative for Black People in Germany (ISD), helped organize the exhibit titled “Homestory Deutschland: Black Biographies from History and the Present” and which provides a collective self-portrait, giving voice to the complex and varied histories of Africans, African-Americans and Afro-Germans from the past three centuries of German history.

“Even though black people have lived in Germany for hundreds of years, it is not viewed as a reality of everyday life,” said Behre, who was born in Eritrea but has lived for virtually all of his life in Germany. “And that can be seen in the discrimination and exclusion in daily life, and that’s what we hope to tackle with this exhibition.”…

…Another of the biographies illuminated in the exhibition is that of Afro-German actor, journalist and activist Theodor Wonja Michael. Born in Hamburg in 1925, Michael is Germany’s oldest living Afro-German. His father moved from Cameroon—then a German colony—to Germany in 1904.

Denied access to higher education on the basis of skin color, he would have liked to have become an archeologist or an ethnologist. But as a young man, one of the few possibilities he had to earn a living wage was as an actor in colonial films or “Völkerschauen”—the ethnological expositions or “human zoos” popular in Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

After the end of the Second World War, Michael found it hard to get work he managed to get work as an actor of the theater stage.

Michael remembers how his father always felt it was his natural right to live in Germany and how this attitude remains integral to own perspective on life as an Afro-German today.

“Afro-German means that one has two backgrounds, namely an African one and a German one,” Michael said. “I think it’s an advantage having an insight into two cultures. I see it as a very positive thing.”…

Read the entire article here.

Is race a ‘salient…’ or ‘dominant identity’ in the early 21st century: The evidence of UK survey data on respondents’ sense of who they are

Social Science Research
Available online 2012-11-07
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2012.10.007

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

The term ‘master status’, coined by Everett Hughes in 1945 with special reference to race, was conceptualised as one which, in most social situations, will dominate all others. Since then race and other collective social identities have become key features of people’s lives, shaping their ‘life scripts’. But is race still a ‘master’ or ‘dominant identity’ and, if not, what has replaced it? Analyses of recent social surveys show that race has lost its position to family, religion (in the South Asian and Black groups) and (amongst young mixed race people) also age/life-stage and study/work. However, many of these different identity attributes are consistently selected, suggesting the possibility – confirmed in in-depth interviews – that they may work through each other via intersectionality. In Britain race appears to have been undermined by the rise of ‘Muslim’ identity, the increasing importance of ‘mixed race’, and the fragmentation of identity now increasingly interwoven with other attributes like religion.

Highlights

• Race has lost its dominant position to family, religion, age/life-stage & study/work.
• Many selected identity attributes work through each other via intersectionality.
• Race has been undermined by religion, mixedness, & fragmentation of identity.

Read or purchase the article here.