Mixed Race Studies

Elizabeth Warren says she’s Native American. So she is.

The Washington Post
2012-05-04

David Treuer

Suddenly many Americans wonder what it means that Elizabeth Warren, who is vying for Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown’s U.S. Senate seat, has identified herself as having Cherokee and Delaware Indian heritage. The claim wasn’t sudden, but the furor is.

Some 20 years ago, she listed herself as a minority in a directory of law professors. Recently the authenticity of her heritage, and her reasons for claiming it, have been called into question on the campaign trail. However, the debate should not be about whether she deserves this minority status, but whether we live in a meritocracy…

…An Indian identity is something someone claims for oneself; it is a matter of choice. It is not legally defined and entails no legal benefits. Being an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe, however, is a legal status that has nothing to do with identity and everything to do with blood quantum. Members must meet requirements set by the tribe in consultation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (Elizabeth Warren is not enrolled in a tribe and doesn’t seem to have sought such status. She doesn’t claim an Indian identity, just Indian ancestry.) Indians who are not enrolled in a tribe aren’t eligible for the aforementioned programs and benefits, including casino profits, education assistance, hunting privileges and housing…

…My father is Jewish, but I didn’t really grow up around any of my Jewish relatives, so claiming a Jewish identity — despite that heritage — would feel strange, presumptuous, disrespectful. On my mother’s side we have an ancestor by the name of Bonga, who was African and ended up at Leech Lake in Minnesota, where he married a woman of the Ojibwe tribe, and where I grew up. Despite this heritage, it would likewise feel very odd to claim that I am African or African American. (I am something like one-156th African.)…

Read the entire opinion here.

Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White

W. W. Norton & Company
May 2002
320 pages
5.5 × 8.3 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-32309-2

Earl Lewis, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Emory University

Heidi Ardizzone, Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Notre Dame

When Alice Jones, a former nanny, married Leonard Rhinelander in 1924, she became the first black woman to be listed in the Social Register as a member of one of New York’s wealthiest families. Once news of the marriage became public, a scandal of race, class, and sex gripped the nation—and forced the couple into an annulment trial.

Are you ‘diverse’?

The Boston Globe
2012-05-05

Dante Ramos, Deputy Editorial Page Editor

In the mid-’90s, around the time Elizabeth Warren’s name was appearing on a list of minority law professors, I was applying for entry-level reporting jobs at dozens of newspapers. In a few cases — one of which involved a summer job at a paper tartly critical of affirmative action — something odd happened. First came the nibble of interest; later, the bashful questions: What, exactly, was my ethnic background? Perhaps I’d like to be considered for a minority internship?

At the time, I was in my early 20s, underemployed, and eager to please. But did I qualify? It was hard to say. One of my parents is Filipino; the other is white; my surname is Spanish. Still, I disliked the implication that my dull, dutiful stories, which I’d clipped to my resume, were suddenly fascinating if their author were less ambiguously ethnic. What grated most — what steered me away from these strange, unbidden opportunities — was that no one asked: Are you actually disadvantaged in some way? Does your ethnicity relate in any way to what you’ve written?

Which brings us back to Elizabeth Warren. We may never know whether she played up her scant Native American ancestry to advance her academic career. But whatever the flap says about the Harvard law professor’s US Senate campaign, it also reflects badly on the ham-fisted, box-checking approach that many employers once took toward diversity — and that some still use today…

…Yet if Warren handled this subject badly, let’s admit that it’s impossible to handle well. The question still lurks: Are you “diverse” or not? For mixed-race Americans who mean neither to exploit their ancestry nor minimize it, politely brushing aside the issue is harder than it seems.

Meanwhile, the usual ethnic categories keep blurring at the edges; the 2010 census counted over 9 million Americans as multiracial. Yet as The New York Times reported last summer, many elite colleges still can’t say how multiracial applicants fit in with their diversity goals. So applicants are left to fret: Check every box that applies, or hope that skipping the question entirely won’t keep you from getting in?…

Read the entire article here.

A 30 Percent of Mixed Race Component in Argentina’s Population

Agentina Investiga: Divulgación y Noticas Universitarias
Universidad Maimónides
Facultad de Ciencias Médicas
2012-04-09

Adrián Giacchino
Departamento de Prensa
Universidad Maimónides

The research of a team formed by anthropologists, biologists, biochemists and archeologists proves that the autochthonous contribution in Argentina’s population might be of a 30%. The results of the work, emerged from an analysis of blood donors in diverse regions of our country, indicate that there is a 65% of European component, a 30% Amerindian and a 5% African. Amerindian lineage is mainly maternal, decreases as we come close to the city of Buenos Aires and increases towards the north and the south.

How many times we have heard that in Argentina “we come from the ships…” and that we are “a melting pot”. This is believed by many people and it was written many times and even legitimated as valid knowledge. But, do we really come from the ships and are we a real melting pot?

“What exists is the mythology that we are white and European –indicates to InfoUniversidades Dr. Francisco Raúl Carnese, who is in charge of the laboratory of Biological Anthropology of the University-. However, our population is mixed. The native composition is very striking, especially in maternal ancestry, which increases towards the north and the south and it is also very important in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, particularly in the suburbs. We have the need to “bleach” populations, but the concept of “melting pot” is questioned. The populations’ genetics showed that there is no continuity between human populations, that the biological variations are of continuous nature. Races do not reflect biological reality, but are social constructions…

Read the entire article here.

Cultural Inversion and the One-Drop Rule: An Essay on Biology, Racial Classification, and the Rhetoric of Racial Transcendence

Albany Law Review
Volume 72, Issue 4 (2009)
Pages 909-928

Deborah W. Post, Professor Emeritus of Law
Touro College, Jacob D. Fuchsberg School of Law
Central Islip, New York

The great paradox in contemporary race politics is exemplified in the narrative constructed by and about President Barack Obama. This narrative is all about race even as it makes various claims about the diminished significance of race: the prospect of racial healing, the ability of a new generation of Americans to transcend race or to choose their own identity, and the emergence of a postracial society. While I do not subscribe to the post-racial theories that have been floated in the press and other media, I do believe that something of great cultural significance occurred which made the candidacy and the election of Barack Obama possible. This essay is an attempt on my part to consider what that change might have been by examining the relationship between science and social change, language and cultural categories, and the role law has played, if any, in dismantling the structures of racism.

What I have to say has very little to do with biology, except to the extent that racial classification is a cultural practice that sometimes deploys biological arguments strategically. Early in the Twentieth century sociologists and anthropologists noted that in the United States, race was more a matter of caste than class and that, unlike other caste systems, it is not cultural, but “biological.” In a racial caste, one sociologist argued, “the criterion is primarily physiognomic, usually chromatic, with socio-economic differences implied.”  Another noted that “American caste is pinned not to cultural but to biological features—to color, features, hair form, and the like.” Biology was used in this early sociological literature on race in a way that made it synonymous with physical appearance or physical characteristics. In politics and legal discourse at the time, racial purity was about “blood” and rules of descent…

…In this article, my thesis is simple. If racial caste has been upended by changes in legal rules that created a hierarchical racial structure, its demise also has been hastened by the use of symbols, a strategy of cultural inversion with respect to the meaning of race.  The operative terms of a centuries-old debate have been inverted. Instead of policing racial purity with arguments about blood and biology or the modern version of them, DNA and genes, these instruments of exclusion, the tools of white supremacists and segregationists, have been used effectively, most recently by Barack Obama, to demonstrate the physical connection between groups that are still treated discursively, politically and socially, as racially distinct…

…The movement to escape the one-drop rule, the rule that examines blood lines as far back as five generations or more, if that is what the multiracial movement is all about, is not, as far as I know, a movement that began in the black community. A major proponent is a white woman, Susan Graham, founder of “Project RACE,” which is the acronym for Reclassify All Children Equally.  What Susan Graham demands is that the children of parents who come from different races be acknowledged as the product of both groups. In other words, this white mother of a child or children whose father is a black man demands that the public, the discourse, the political  instrumentalities, the private institutions, acknowledge the status of her child as white as well as black…

…The demand for multiracial identity for the children of interracial marriage, however, may be explained in terms of a desire for status as long as we live in a society in which there is still a clear racial hierarchy. The demand that multiracial children be recognized as partly white did not come from blacks.  Nor is it surprising that Susan Graham, a major advocate for the multiracial category on the United States Census found an ally in Newt Gingrich, who opined that such a category might “‘be an important step toward transcending racial division.’” The enthusiasm for such alternative classifications leads skeptics to believe that this system of reclassification and the rhetoric of transcendence will make it easy to ignore the reality and the structure of racism.

It may be that the promotion of a multiracial identity provides some white parents with the assurance that they have not been rejected by their own children. Their children are part of them and, therefore, partly white. People who cross racial lines to marry do not leave behind all of their attitudes towards race; their internalized assumptions about racial characteristics and racial hierarchy can be a source of misunderstanding, a vulnerability that at the very worst can injure or divide family members…

Read the entire article here.

Marcia Dawkins, Author of “Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing” on Mixed Race Radio

Mixed Race Radio
Blogtalkradio
2012-05-02, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Marcia Dawkins’ book, Clearly Invisible and the Color of Cultural Identity (Baylor University Press, 2012), is the first to connect racial passing and classical rhetoric to issues of disability, gender-neutral parenting, human trafficking, hacktivism, identity theft, racial privacy, media typecasting and violent extremism.

By applying fresh eyes to landmark historical cases and benchmark popular culture moments in the history of passing Dawkins also rethinks the representational character and civic purpose of multiracial identities. In the process she provides powerful insights called “passwords” that help readers tackle the tough questions of who we are and how we can relate to one another and the world.

For more information, click here.

How Scuffletown Became Indian Country: Political Change and Transformations in Indian identity in Robeson County, North Carolina, 1865-1956

University of Washington
2008
267 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3328369
ISBN: 9780549817246

Anna Bailey

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

According to census reports, there were no Indians in Robeson County, North Carolina in the decades leading up to the Civil War. But as the war ended and Reconstruction began, a community, known today as the Lumbee Indians, moved from the category of mulatto into the category of Indian. My dissertation charts the emergence and evolution of Lumbee Indian identity. I argue that Lumbee identity was continually transformed in the midst of political struggles from the end of the Civil War through the post-World War II era. From the end of the Civil War to the 1930s, Lumbee identity was forged in the regional crucible of Reconstruction and Jim Crow politics and articulated through the local institutions of Indian-only churches and schools in Robeson County. Beginning in the 1930s and through the post-World War II era, national developments molded expressions of Lumbee Indian identity. The Great Depression, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, and the onset of World War II shifted the markers of Lumbee identity from churches, schools, and kinship networks to nationally recognized indices of Indianness such as measurements of Indian blood quantum, line of tribal descent, and recognizably Indian cultural traditions. By highlighting the change in Lumbee identity from a regional entity to a nationally inflected construct, this dissertation illuminates the interconnection between the contours of Lumbee identity and the shifting political landscape in Robeson County from the end of the Civil War through the World War II era.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• Chapter One: How an Outlaw became an Indian: Henry Berry Lowry and the Conservative Press, 1865-1872
• Chapter Two: Separating Out: The Emergence of Croatan Indian Identity, 1872-1900
• Chapter Three: “It is the center to which we should cling”: The Indian School System in Robeson County during Jim Crow, 1900-1930
• Chapter Four: National Events in Robeson County: The Great Depression, Indian Reorganization Act and Anthropometry, 1930-1940
• Chapter Five: “You’re the Lumbee Problem”: Social Scientist and Cultural Expressions of Indian Identity in the 1940s and Beyond
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Purchase the dissertation here.

BLACK, TRIGUEÑO, WHITE…? Shifting Racial Identification among Puerto Ricans

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
Volume 2, Issue 2 (2005)
pages 267-285
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X05050186

Carlos Vargas-Ramos, Research Associate
Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Hunter College, City University of New York

The use of U.S.-oriented racial categories in the 2000 decennial census conducted by the Census Bureau in Puerto Rico provided results that may not accurately reflect social dynamics in Puerto Rico, more generally, and inequality based on race, in particular. This work explores how variations in racial typologies used for the collection of data in Puerto Rico and the methodology used to collect such data produce widely ranging results on racial identification that in turn affect the measurement of the impact of “race” on social outcomes. Specifically, the analysis focuses on how the omission of locally based and meaningful racial terminology from census questionnaires leads to results on racial identification that differ markedly from those found in survey data that include such terminology. In addition, differing strategies to record the racial identification of Puerto Ricans on the island (i.e., self-identification versus identification by others), lead to variations that highlight the changing effect of race on socioeconomic status. Who identifies a person’s race affects analyses of how race affects the life chances of individuals in Puerto Rico.

Authors Probe Roots of U.S. Far Right

Southern Poverty Law Center
Intelligence Report
Winter 2009, Issue Number: 136

Heidi Beirich

Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant
By Jonathan Peter Spiro
Burlington, Vt.: University of Vermont Press, 2009
$39.95 (hardback)

The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States
By Gerald Horne
New York: New York University Press, 2009
$22.00 (hardback)

A bumper crop of works on influential early 20th century American racists, fascists and eugenicists has been hitting the bookshelves in 2009. Two of the most interesting are on Madison Grant (1865-1937), perhaps the most important conservationist of his time and so pernicious a racist and anti-Semite that he helped inspire Hitler’s policies, and Lawrence Dennis (1893-1977), the biggest defender of fascism in the 1930s, who was, surprisingly, a black man passing for white.

Jonathan Peter Spiro’s biography of Grant, a very rich member of the American WASP elite, is eye opening. It is astonishing to realize how many major American figures of the early 1900s were so rabidly racist and anti-Semitic — and perfectly willing to use the power of the state to sterilize those they saw as lesser beings. Spiro’s book is fundamental to understanding how profoundly our nation has been shaped by racist and anti-Semitic ideas…

…Grant’s most important work, The Passing of the Great Race, was first published in 1916 by the elite Charles Scribner’s Sons. Its basic thesis, still popular among American white supremacists today, is that miscegenation and immigration were destroying America’s superior “Nordic” race. In their time, Grant’s beliefs were popular, even meriting a mention in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (the celebrated author and Grant shared the same Scribner editor).

Presaging Hitler’s infamous words, Grant called Nordics “the Master Race.” To protect that race, Grant was quite clear that restrictions curtailing Jewish and Southern European immigration were necessary. Eugenics, too, were required. He wrote that the effort should begin by sterilizing the “criminals,” the “insane” and the “diseased,” followed by the “weaklings” and, ultimately, all “worthless race types.”…

…American Fascist

Gerald Horne’s The Color of Fascism is a much slimmer volume on the unlikely career as an American fascist of Lawrence Dennis, a far-right thinker who passed as white and whose ideas are still prized today by radical right activists, including veteran anti-Semite Willis Carto.

Dennis was an interesting character. He was born in Atlanta of a black mother and white father in 1893 and was a child prodigy. Before the age of 10, Dennis wrote a book on his Christian beliefs and preached his religion to massive crowds in the U.S. and Europe—never hiding his black mother, who shepherded him around the world. But as he grew older, the light-skinned Dennis made a decision to leave his far darker-skinned mother behind and to begin to pass for white. By the 1920s, he had achieved the unthinkable for a black man of the time, graduating from Exeter and then Harvard and going on to make careers for himself in the State Department and on Wall Street, where he was one of the few who predicted the 1929 stock market crash. That prediction led to a profitable run of speaking engagements for Dennis in the 1930s and vaulted him into the upper-class social circles of the far right, where he became particularly close to Charles and Anne Lindbergh.

By the 1930s, Dennis had evolved into the public face of American fascism, making connections with American extremists and traveling to Europe to meet with Mussolini, whom he later said he was “less impressed with” than Hitler. In 1941, Dennis was named “America’s No. 1 Intellectual Fascist” by Life.

So what made Dennis an adherent of an ideology that most certainly would have oppressed him and other African Americans? Horne theorizes that Dennis may well have been attracted to fascism simply because it stood starkly opposed to American “democracy,” which then so openly oppressed blacks living under Jim Crow. He wrote often and eloquently of the impending ascendancy of the fascist model, and regularly ascribed America’s decay to its racist policies — a point that oddly seemed missed by his many racist allies…

Read the entire review here.

“Which box am I?”: Towards a Culturally Grounded, Contextually Meaningful Method of Racial and Ethnic Categorization in Puerto Rico

Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey
August 2009
59 pages

Isar P. Godreau
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

Carlos Vargas-Ramos, Research Associate
Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Hunter College, City University of New York

This report represents a first step in attempting to ascertain a culturally valid and efficient method of racial and ethnic categorization for Puerto Rico, which may be used to document and track discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity in employment. Research conducted for this study was developed in close collaboration with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), in support of their efforts to ascertain the extent of race and ethnic discrimination in the workplace in Puerto Rico. Results outlined herein summarize the views of 33 experts on the subject on race and racial discrimination in Puerto Rico who were interviewed for these purposes. Findings are preliminary and draw on the analysis of 33 individual questionnaires and 3 focus groups coordinated by Dr. Godreau at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Research of the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey in March 2009.

Read the entire report here.