Mixed Race Studies

The Invisibility of Multiracial Students: An Emerging Majority by 2050

University of California, San Diego
January 2009
252 pages

Gina Acosta Potter

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership

By the nature of their existence, multiracial people call to question deeply held notions of race and racial classification held tightly by Americans. To acknowledge a person as multiracial, or a blending of more than one race, defies the conventional social construct that delineates clear, discernible, and discrete races. Even as multiracial students become increasingly visible in our nation’s schools, multiracial identity is seldom recognized as a critical topic of diversity within the educational arena. By 2050, the multiracial population will surface as a majority group of people whose presence will require our nation to redefine our current constructs of race, racial identification, and racial classification (Anderson, 2002; Winters & DeBose, 2003). This qualitative research study seeks to address the primary research question: How and to what extent do public policy decisions regarding academic accountability affect educational outcomes for multiracial students in two states that differ in their multiracial categorization policies?

The purpose of this study is to illuminate racial subgroups identified within accountability systems, determine the degree to which multiracial students are rendered visible in the academic accountability movement, and examine the needs of multiracial students. The research design is a comparative case study of two state education agencies and the public policies they employ when monitoring the academic achievement of multiracial students.

The major findings of this study reveal: 1) a misalignment between federal and state accountability systems for racial classification; 2) a variance in how two state education agencies racially classify mixed race students; 3) a nonstandardized approach to school enrollment categorization of multiracial students; 4) controversy regarding the meaning of race and ethnicity; 5) various approaches taken by multiracial students when self-identifying 6) data methodology challenges; and 7) a more than ten year lapse in time before the federal Department of Education moved towards complying with the White House Office of Management and Budget regulations allowing multiracial individuals to identify as more than one race.

The implications of this research indicate a significant need for the United States’ educational system to face the challenge of recognizing and responding to the histories, experiences, and identities of multiracial students within our schools.

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Brazilian system of racial classification

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published Online: 2011-12-05
6 pages
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.632022

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

Michael Banton’s text belongs to the long tradition of European social sciences which rejects the conceptual use of the lerm ‘race’ in sociological analyses. His work is also linked to the school—this time a minority—that uses individualist and logico-analytic methodologies, largey shunning historical, structuralist or holistic analyses. The real novelty of his approach, though, resides in bringing the natural concept of ‘colour’ to the centre of sociological analyses of the kinds of social differentiation and hierarchization that arise from the encounters between distinct peoples and cultures.

However my comments in this short text will not address any of these aspects head on. Instead I shall concentrate on clarifying what seems to me to be the weak point of the empirical example used by Banton in his argument, namely, the Brazilian system of racial classification, which, according to the author, is based not on race but on colour, by which he means skin colour or tone.

To allow the reader to follow my comments, it is worth briefly recalling what we know about the Brazilian system of racial classification, a topic systematically studied by sociologists and anthropologists between the 1940s and 1970s (Frazier 1944; Pierson 1945; Hutchinson 1952; Wagley 1952; Zimmerman 1952; Azevedo 1953: Fernandes 1955; Bastide and Berghe 1957; Harris and Kottak 1963; Harris 1970; Sanjek 1971; Nogueira 1985), with the aim of deciphering its classifieatory principles. From 1872 onwards the Brazilian census classified the ‘colours’ of Brazilians on the basis of the theory that mestiços ‘revert’ or ‘regress’ to one of the ‘pure races’ involved in the mixture an ideology that shaped both common-sense and academic knowledge at the end of the nineteenth century. The 1872 census, for example, created four ‘colour groups’: white, caboclo, black and brown (branco, caboclo (mixed…

Read or purchase the article here.

“Race” & Ethnicity in Society in Social-Historical Context (AAS-SOC 338)

Lehman College, City University of New York
Spring 2012

Mark Christian, Professor & Chair of African & African American Studies

The idea of “race” since the 18th Century, and up to the present, has brought forth tremendous social inequality and, not to be over-dramatic, “social death” in a global sense. The ironic thing about “race” is that, from a scientific-biological sense, most authoritative commentators note that it is a problematic concept with little validity if one is arguing for “distinct races” among humankind. In other words, there are no distinct racial types of humans that can be separated from one another. Yes, there is some minor genetic difference among humans, such as skin color, hair texture, eye shape, lip-size; but when measured by what it is to be a human being these add up to only minor genetic differences. However there are still those who will try to put difference between humankind via pseudo-scientific racial theories. Some biologists use modern genetic science to distort the truth that we are all basically the same in humanity. A recent book by Dorothy Roberts called Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011) gives a powerful insight into the abuse of modern genetics.

What is significant about “race” and ethnicity (ethnicity is largely related to shared cultural experiences of a specific racialized social group) is the reality of its social significance over time and place. Indeed, “race” has changed from one place to another. For example, what it is to be Black in South Africa is not the same in a social-historical context to what it is to be Black in the United States over time. We can make this point even more complex by stating what it was to be Black in the United States could once change from one state to another. The point here is to comprehend that “race” has been a socially constructed concept over time that has wielded a great amount of human misery and pain for certain social groups, and a great amount of power and privilege for other social groups. Our task is to come to an understanding of this complex topic and for this to be worthwhile intellectually we shall have to comprehend the idea of “race” from a social-historical context.

Given the social significance of White privilege in terms of “race” grouping and hierarchy, this course will focus on the how “whiteness” creates both a conscious and sub-conscious reality that is born out of the historical exploitation of people of color from the period enslavement and the plantation economy (17th – 19th Centuries) experience right through to the present. Even though we now live in a world whereby racism is largely outcast and a forbidden entity in social discourse and interaction, it still lurks beneath the surface in all things social. The current US statistical data on health, wealth, and other societal disparities between so-called “races” makes the comprehension of “whiteness” an important, indeed essential, part of our studies.

Although the course is taught primarily from a social-historical perspective, it is at bottom an interdisciplinary course involving aspects of knowledge from the humanities and social sciences. Having a positive and open mind that has a willingness to learn and work hard will be the key to your success in this class. We shall combine sociology, history, film & documentary to give a dynamic learning experience. The course will be taught via an interactive perspective whereby students will engage with the material and present in individual and group formats. Moreover, it is essentially a reading and writing class with interactive discussion. RESPECT for all in the classroom environment is imperative; regardless of one’s philosophical views or social background, gender, racialized self, or other human attribute.

Learning outcomes:
By the end of this course students should be able to demonstrate an understanding of:

• “Race” as a social construct and therefore “racialized” issues that produce social inequality in the US.
• “Race” as a problematic concept if put to biological scientific inquiry.
• The fallacy of “racial typology” classification.
• Whiteness in the social imagination.
• White privilege and white ethnic groups.
• Sociological theories of “race” & ethnicity.
• How to think critically about “race” & ethnicity.
• The “cultural minority” problematic in regard to peoples of color.
• Multicultural issues in a hierarchical “race” and social-cultural framework.
• Social inequality in terms of “race,” class and gender.
• How to talk about “racial issues” effectively, and get beyond racialized stereotyping.

Key Reading:

• Mark Christian. (Ed.) Integrated but Unequal: Black Faculty in Predominately White Space. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2012)
• Nell I. Painter. The History of White People. (New York: Norton, 2010)
• Paula S. Rothenberg. (Ed.) White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. (New York: Worth, 2011)
• Barbara Trepagnier. Silent Racism: How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide, 2nd Edition. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010)

The decline of Jamaica’s interracial households and the fall of the planter class, 1733–1823

Atlantic Studies
Volume 9, Issue 1, (January, 2012)  (Special Issue: Rethinking the Fall of the Planter Class)
pages 107-123
DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2012.637002

Daniel Livesay, Assistant Professor of History
Drury University, Springfield, Missouri

The theory of planter decline traditionally implied that social and sexual chaos in the West Indies produced a middle caste of mixed-race individuals who destabilized colonial life. This article contends that for most of the eighteenth century, interracial relationships were normative unions that did not undercut the central function of the sugar and slave economy. In Jamaica, colonial regulations against free people of color came with individual exemptions that allowed mixed-race elites to skirt the very laws intended to keep them marginalized. Despite differences of color, these personal and familial connections between free coloreds and white fathers helped to maintain strong social hierarchies among the island’s wealthiest ranks. Abolitionist attacks against these family units, however, along with the ever present threat of enslaved revolt, changed conceptions of the Jamaican household at the close of the eighteenth century. Moreover, as Jamaica’s mixed-race population grew and became more endogamous, personal connections to whites dwindled, escalating political conflict on the island. Interracial relationships, therefore, did not herald planter decline, but rather forestalled it.

In the opening chapter of The Fall of the Planter Class, Lowell Ragatz recited a liturgy of social, economic, and cultural issues which had predestined West Indian elites to failure. An outdated agricultural system, regressive economic policies, and political changes brought about by incessant warfare constituted the core of these problems. Ragatz could not ignore, however, the general sense of dissipation and lecherousness frequently associated with Caribbean planters. Echoing many eighteenth-century observers, he viewed island society as backward and unstable:

The white man in tropical America was out of his habitat. Constant association with an inferior subject race blunted his moral fibre and he suffered marked demoralization… Miscegenation, so contrary to Anglo-Saxon nature, resulted in the rapid rise of a race of human hybrids.

Indeed, it was this very “growth of a mixed blood element [that] offered concrete evidence of the Anglo-Saxon’s moral break-down in the torrid zone.” If the avowed goal of island life was to keep blacks separate from whites, then interracial relationships signified a clear disruption in social order.” Cross-racial pairings, according to this retelling, gave an added push to the crumbling pillars of white planter control…

Read or purchase the article here.

Racing ahead, going nowhere

Very Fine Commentary
2011-04-17

Yoong Ren Yan, Editor

Are we running around in circles with our policies on race?

Racism is bad. What more is there to say?”

It may not have been the case just 50 years ago in the time of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, but in today’s world, being against racism is rather unremarkable. Part of the reason Nelson Mandela is such a universally revered figure is because his cause is no longer controversial. Those that are the least bit racist are promptly and collectively refuted, and with good reason: racism is not only astoundingly irrational, but also one of the worst forms of injustice humans have ever inflicted on others.

Yet there is more to the issue of race. Our insistence that people not be judged based on their skin has not extended to consensus on how to achieve that end. While we all agree that racial discrimination, exploitation and conflict should be things of the past, there are, broadly, two contradictory visions for the future. Which of these should be pursued, and by what means, are sources of unrecognised controversy, and therefore deserve further debate.

More is not better

Singapore represents one of these cases. The Singaporean model is encapsulated in our national obsession with ‘multi-’: we are taught that our nation is multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-lingual. We present ourselves as a rojak society, a mix of different cultures and ethnicities whose flavours blend into a single dish. Our government is committed to ‘racial harmony’, and envisages Singapore’s four races coexisting peacefully, accepting one another’s differences and working together to build a nation.

For a country that not so long ago was mired in communal violence, division and mutual mistrust, Singapore has made notable progress. It is a prime example of multi-racialism. It has succeeded with two parallel strategies: firstly, to group the population into CMIO (Chinese Malay Indian Others); and secondly, to encourage, and where necessary enforce, cohesion amongst these four races. This approach has manifested itself in our policies on language (English first, no dialects), education (English-medium schools), housing (the Ethnic Integration Policy), social security (ethnic self-help groups) and even the media (censorship, the Sedition Act).

Yet, as Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew constantly reminds us, our multi-racial society is still fragile and vulnerable, and could just unravel if we become complacent. In a world stricken with ethnic conflict, his words resonate. But in some senses, Singapore’s drive to become multi-racial has sown the seeds of subterranean tension by continuing to entrench notions of race in society, just at a time when such notions are gradually fading away. Instead of allowing the winds to blow over our divisions, multi-racialism deepens the lines in the sand and widens our already narrowing differences.

This is exemplified by Racial Harmony Day, an attempt to promote cohesion by showcasing the four nationally-sanctioned cultures. Exposure to cultural differences may have been useful in our formative years, but today, a day that celebrates differences rather than similarities and inculcates the notion of race in our children from a young age seems rather anachronistic. Worse yet, divergent racial identities are enforced even when these identities have become far fainter over the years. The result is a farce where Singaporeans put in the special effort to buy cheongsams or learn how to play the angklung on Racial Harmony Day to fit into the race and culture of which they are supposedly a part…

…In concentrating on multi-racialism, our strategies have obstructed society from becoming less race-conscious, which has artificially perpetuated the existence of race in Singapore, with its attendant tensions and clashes. It is difficult enough to encourage integration. If society spontaneously turns away from race, why should the government stick obsessively to its multi-racial stance?…

Read the entire article here.

Multiple Realities: Reconsidering Multiracialism in Singapore

World Scientific Publishing
Summer 2012
150 pages
ISBN: 978-981-270-604-1; 981-270-604-6

Eugene K. B. Tan, Assistant Professor of Law
Singapore Management University, Singapore

How has Singapore’s multiracialism policy evolved, and how has it impacted on ethnic relations and nation-building in a secure, yet perpetually vulnerable, Singapore? This important book addresses these important questions through a critical analysis of ethnic markers in key facets of Singaporean life, such as elections and race quotas in public housing, national service, ethnic self-help groups, the rise of “Chineseness” and increased religious piety. The author challenges the conventional wisdom that multiracialism in Singapore is unequivocally race-blind or nonethnic in its approach. Instead, he argues that Singapore is an ethnic-conscious state wherein race, culture and language are instrumentally mobilized as key resources in nation-building and political governance. This could have potentially ethnic/racial enhancing or polarizing effects, thus undermining the stability of the multiracial framework in Singapore.

Contents:

• Introduction — The Multiple Realities of Multiracialism
• Race and Multiracialism as a Mode of Governance in Singapore
• Institutionalizing Multiracialism: The Legal, Institutional Framework and the Periodization of Ethnic Relations
• Electoral Politics: Electing Race Consciousness?
• The Citizen’s Army: The Dilemmas of Faith, Loyalty and Citizenship
• The Essence of Self-Help and the Dilemmas of Ethnic Essentialism
• Multiracialism and the Growing Assertion of Chineseness: Ethnic Consciousness as a Cultural Resource
• The Specter of Religious Extremism: Veiled Threats, Fearful Faithful Piety and Enlarging the Common Space
• The Impoverishment of Multiracialism: The Lack of Shared Institutions
• Conclusion: The Way Ahead

Mixing it up: Multiracialism redefines Asian American identity

San Francisco Chronicle
2011-02-11

Jeff Yang, Special to SF Gate

How the mainstreaming of multiracialism is forcing a more fluid definition of Asian American identity
 
Like many immigrants, my parents see identity as a bucket. My mother and father had come to America carefully bearing a pail of old-world traditions, cherished customs, shining morals and rock-ribbed ethics; they’d worked hard and sacrificed greatly to give me and my sister the things they never had. And then, they handed us the bucket—knowing that in the transfer, a little bit of culture would inevitably slosh out over the side…

…Going fourth

It’s something that needs to be considered. As multiracial identity becomes the Asian American mainstream—by 2020, it’s projected that one out of five Asians in the U.S. will be multiracial; by 2050, that ratio will exceed one in three—the population of persons with one-fourth Asian heritage or less is poised to spike.
 
“I’m half Japanese, and my husband is all Irish,” says sociologist Dr. Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain. “Our kids have very Celtic coloration—pale skin and fair hair. They’re not obviously Asian in appearance at all, and yet they still feel very connected with that part of their heritage. And that’s becoming more common, particularly among Japanese Americans, where multiracial identity is so common. There’s even a term for it I heard in California: ‘Quapa.’ If hapas are half Asians, quapas—like my kids—are quarter-Asians.”
 
Quapas have an overwhelmingly non-Asian ancestry; many don’t look Asian and don’t have Asian surnames. Yet anecdotal evidence suggests that as Asian America becomes more multiracial, a growing number of quapa Asians are affirmatively reconnecting with their Asian heritage, and actively embracing a sense of Asian American identity—challenging society’s conventional means of defining race in the process…

Read the entire article here.

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

Princeton University Press
March 2012
282 pages
6 x 9; 17 halftones. 14 line illus. 10 tables
Cloth ISBN: 9780691152998
eBook ISBN: 9781400841943

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Vesla M. Weaver, Assistant Professor
The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
University of Virginia

Traci R. Burch, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Northwestern University

The American racial order—the beliefs, institutions, and practices that organize relationships among the nation’s races and ethnicities—is undergoing its greatest transformation since the 1960s. Creating a New Racial Order takes a groundbreaking look at the reasons behind this dramatic change, and considers how different groups of Americans are being affected. Through revealing narrative and striking research, the authors show that the personal and political choices of Americans will be critical to how, and how much, racial hierarchy is redefined in decades to come.

The authors outline the components that make up a racial order and examine the specific mechanisms influencing group dynamics in the United States: immigration, multiracialism, genomic science, and generational change. Cumulatively, these mechanisms increase heterogeneity within each racial or ethnic group, and decrease the distance separating groups from each other. The authors show that individuals are moving across group boundaries, that genomic science is challenging the whole concept of race, and that economic variation within groups is increasing. Above all, young adults understand and practice race differently from their elders: their formative memories are 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Obama’s election—not civil rights marches, riots, or the early stages of immigration. Blockages could stymie or distort these changes, however, so the authors point to essential policy and political choices.

Portraying a vision, not of a postracial America, but of a different racial America, Creating a New Racial Order examines how the structures of race and ethnicity are altering a nation.

Contents

• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction
• PART I: THE ARGUMENT
  • 1. Destabilizing the American Racial Order
• PART II: CREATING A NEW ORDER
  • 2. Immigration
  • 3. Multiracialism
  • 4. Genomics
  • 5. Cohort Change
  • 6. Blockages to Racial Transformation
• PART III: POSSIBILITIES
  • 7. The Future of the American Racial Order
• Notes
• References
• Index

Introduction

A racial order—the set of beliefs, assumptions, rules, and practices that shape the way in which groups in a given society are connected with one another—may seem fixed. Racial orders do change, however. The change may be gradual, as when America evolved over two centuries from being a society with slaves to a slave society, or cataclysmic as when slavery or serfdom is abolished or apartheid instituted. A racial order can change for some groups but not others; the Immigration Act of 1924 denied all Asians and most Kuropcans and Africans, but not Latin Americans, the right of entry to the United States. Change in a racial order is most visible when it results from severe struggle, but it may also occur unintentionally through thousands of cumulative small acts and thoughts. And a racial order can change in some but not all dimensions; American Indians gained U.S. citizenship in 1924 but few have reacquired the land lost through centuries of conquest and appropriation.

Variation in pace, direction, activity, and object makes it difficult to see major change while it is occurring. Nevertheless, we argue that the racial order of the late twentieth century that emerged from the 1960’s civil rights movement, opening of immigration, and Great Society is undergoing a cumulative, wide-ranging, partly unintentional and partly deliberate transformation. The transformation is occurring in locations and laws, beliefs and practices. Its starting point was the abolition of institutional supports and public commitments of the pre-1960s racial order, such as intermarriage bans, legally mandated segregation, unembarrassed racism, and racial or ethnic discrimination. Once those props were removed, the changes broadly signaled by “the 1960s” could develop over the next forty years. They included a rise in immigration, Blacks’ assertion of pride and dignity, Whites’ rejection of racial supremacy (at least in public), a slow opening of schools, jobs, and suburbs to people previously excluded, and a shift in government policy from promoting segregation and hierarchy and restricting interracial unions to promoting (at least officially) integration and equality and allowing interracial unions.

As a consequence, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, new institutions and practices have been moving into place: official records permit people to identify with more than one race, anti-discrimination policies are well established in schools and workplaces, and some non-Whites hold influential political positions. At the same time, the late twentieth century’s understanding of the very meaning of race—a few exhaustive and mutually exclusive groups—is becoming less and less tenable as a consequence of new multiracial identities, immigrants’ rejection of conventional American categories, and genomic science. Social relations, particularly among young Americans, are less driven by stereotypes, more fluid and fragmented, and more susceptible to creation rather than acquiescence. Even deeply seated hierarchies of income, educational attainment and achievement, prestige, and political power are easing for some groups and in some dimensions of life. Race or ethnicity, though still important, is less likely to predict a young person’s life chances than at any previous point in American history; today’s young adults will move through adulthood with the knowledge that one need not be White in order to become the most powerful person in the world…

…Thus the late twentieth-century racial order captures less and less of the way in which race and ethnicity are practiced in the United States today and may be practiced in the foreseeable future. If transformative forces persist and prevail, the United States can finally move toward becoming the society that James Madison envisioned in Federalist #10, one in which no majority faction, not even native-born European Americans, dominates the political, economic, or social arena.

The Madisonian vision must not blind us to two concerns. If it persists, creation of a new racial order will not have only beneficial results. Some Americans are likely to be harmed by these changes and will thereby suffer relative or even absolute losses. Continuing the venerable American pattern, they will be disproportionately African American or Native American, supplemented by undocumented immigrants. All Americans are likely to lose some of the joys and advantages of a strong sense of group identity and rootedness. The greater concern, however, is that the newly created racial order will not persist and prevail. Black poverty and alienation may be too deep; White supremacy may be too tenacious; institutional change may be too shallow; undocumented immigrants may not attain a path to belonging; genomic research may usher in a new era of eugenic discrimination. In short, Americans may in the end lack the political will to finish what demographic change, scientific research, young adults’ worldviews, and the momentum of the past decade have
started…

…Our exploration of transformative forces and their blockages is spread over three parts and seven chapters. Part 1, “The Argument,” has one chapter. Chapter 1 explicates the five components of a societal racial order and suggests what is at stake in the ongoing reinvention of the American racial order. Examples show how immigration, multiracialism, genomics, and cohort change are transforming each component of the late twentieth-century racial order. Chapter 1 also points to elements of American society that could distort or block transformation of the racial order. Perhaps most important, it provides analytic justification for our expectation that creative forces will outweigh blockages, so long as Americans take steps to incorporate those now in danger of exclusion and to improve the life chances of those at the bottom.

Part 2, “Creating a New Order,” consists of five chapters. Chapters 2 through 5 respectively analyze immigration, multiracialism, genomics, and cohort change, in each case using the five components of a racial order to organize the discussion. Despite variation in the content and process of change, a consistent pattern emerges: each transformative force independently (and all of them interactively) is changing how Americans understand what a race is, how individuals are classified, how groups are relatively positioned, how state actions affect people’s freedom of choice, and how people relate to one another in the society. Chapter 6 looks at the opposite side of the creative dynamic—that is, features of the American racial order that reinforce the late twentieth-century order of clear racial and ethnic boundaries, relatively fixed group positions, intermittently prohibitive state actions, and hostile social relations. Chapter 6 focuses on four issues that directly challenge the transformative forces—the costs of a loss in group identity, wealth disparities, unprecedented levels of Black and Latino incarceration, and the possibility that illegal immigrants or Muslims might become the new pariah group. It warns that effective creation of a new racial order can itself deepen the disadvantage of the worst off even while moving toward a more racially inclusive polity.

Finally, part 3, “Possibilities,” consists of one chapter. Chapter 7 concludes by considering the likelihood that the current American racial order will look very different by the time our children reach old age. It also sketches some political and policy directions necessary to promote transformation, expand its benefits, and reduce the proportion of Americans who arc left out or harmed…

Envisioning Chinese Identity and Managing Multiracialism in Singapore

International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference
2009-10-18 through 2009-10-22
Coex, Seoul, Korea
9 pages

Leong Koon Chan, Associate Professor
School of Design Studies
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Multiracialism and bilingualism are key concepts for national ideology and policy in the management of Singapore for nation building. Multiracialism is implemented in social policies to regulate racial harmony in the population of Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other, a social stratification matrix inherited from the British administration. Bilingualism—the teaching and learning of English and the mother tongue in primary and secondary schools—is rationalised as the ‘cultural ballast’ to safeguard Asian identities and values against Western influences. This focus on ‘culture’ as a means of engendering a relationship between the individual and the nation suggests that as a tool for government policy culture is intricately linked to questions of identity. In discussing multiracialism it is necessary to address ethnicity for the two concepts are intertwined.

This paper investigates the crucial role that imagery plays in our understanding of nationalism by examining the policy and process of language reform for the Chinese in Singapore through the visual culture of the Speak Mandarin Campaigns, 1979-2005. Drawing upon object analysis, textual/document analysis and visual interpretation, the research analyses how the graphic communication process is constructed and reconstructed as indices of government and public responses to the meanings of multiracialism and Chineseness.

Central to the findings are Anthony D. Smith’s (1993) contention that “national symbols, customs and ceremonies are the most potent and durable aspects of nationalism,” and Raymond Williams’ (1981) contention that social ideologies are reflective of “structures of feeling”, defined as individual and collective meanings and values, “…with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension…a social experience which is still in process.”

Read the entire paper here.

Anthropology at the Washington Meeting for 1911

Science Magazine
Volume 35, Number 904 (1912-04-26)
pages 665-676
DOI: 10.1126/science.35.904.665

George Grant MacCurdy (1863-1947), Assistant Professor of Archæology
Yale University

The annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association was held in the United States National Museum, Washington, D. C., December 27-30, 1911, in affiliation with Section H of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Folk-Lore Society. The attendance was good and the program exceptionally long and interesting. The most important features were the two symposia: (1) “The Problems of the Unity or Plurality and the Probable Place of Origin of the American Aborigines, ” discussed by J. W. Fewkes, A. Hrdlieka, W. H. Dall, J. W. Gidley, A. H. Clark, W. H. Holmes, Alice C. Fletcher, Walter Hough, Stansbury Hagar, A. F. Chamberlain and R. B. Dixon; and (2) “Culture and Environment,” discussed by J. W. Fewkes, Clark Wissler, Edward Sapir and Robert H. Lowie. The first of these two discussions is printed in full in the January-March issue of the Anthropologist, and the second will appear in the April-June issue. Dr. J. Walter Fewkes presided at the six sessions in charge of the American Anthropological Association; also at the single session of the American Folk-Lore Society, in the absence of Professor Henry M. Belden, president of that society. Professor George T. Ladd, vice president of Section H, was chairman of the single session in charge of the section. The social functions to which members of the affiliated societies were invited included: a reception by Dr. and Mrs. Robert S. Woodward at the Carnegie Institution, a reception at the New National Museum, and the opening of the Corcoran Gallery of Art…

…Some Aspects of the Negro Problem: ALBERT ERNEST JENKS, University of Minnesota.

Immigration.—Since we have a serious negro problem is it reasonable that this problem be made more difficult by admission into the United States each year of an increasing number of un-Americanized immigrant alien negroes.

There are no United States laws against such immigration. Just short of 40,000 such persons have come to this country in the last ten years; in 1911 we received 6,721. They come from near at hand-three fourths coming from the West Indies. The West Indies have nearly 6,000,000 negroes, any of whom may come to the United States. America debars oriental peoples, not because they are inferior, but because they and their culture are so different from American people and culture. For the same reason we should exclude the “African black.” He should also be excluded because his admission is unfair to the white and also to the negro American-since he makes even more difficult one of America’s most perplexing problems.

Miscegenation.—There are two forms of negro-white miscegenation: (1) Legal marriage, permitted permitted in twenty-three states where the unions are largely between negro men and white women; (2) illegal, more or less temporary unions, usually between white men and negro women. Investigation in a certain area shows that 65 per cent. of the white wives of negro men are foreign born girls—usually of Teutonic peoples. Over two per cent. of children are born to these marriages. The result of both these forms of miscegenation is an increasing number of mulattoes cemented by color and prejudice to the negro race, while by inheritance they are endowed to a considerable degree with Anglo-Saxon initiative, will, ideals and desire for a square-deal—which, because of their color, they can seldom get. These mulattoes are the migrants in the north and west of the United States; they are more migrant than the restless, foot-free white American. The mulatto is the chief factor in the negro problem; the problem is bound to increase, then, in geographic area, in number of discontented negroes, and in its intensity, hand in hand with the increased flow of Anglo-Saxon blood into the veins of this new American man. All forms of miscegenation between the two races should be made a felony, punishable for one offence; and the father of children born to one white and one negro parent should be held to support and educate such children.

Who is a Negro?—The negro should be defined uniformly, so that there would be no question of the legal and racial status of any given person, no matter in what commonwealth he may be. To-day there is no such uniformity of laws.

Murderous Race Riots.—The white man ‘s passion against the offending, or suspected, negro is often nothing short of blood vengeance against the negro race. This is seen in the fact that assault against the virtue of a white woman is only one of some three dozen offences for which negroes are annually lynched. In many of these lynchings and burnings murder is not committed in the frenzy of the moment; the mob starts out to lynch or burn-the crime is premeditated. If America is to train her annual armies of immigrant recruits into law-respecting and law-abiding citizens, she must punish to the limit necessary all participants in murderous race riots.

Education.—Each negro child should have, so far as public and private schools are concerned, an equal opportunity with the white child to make of himself all that he is capable of being.

Investigation.—A commission should be selected to study every aspect of the negro problem. This commission might well be financed by private funds so as to keep it from the almost certain bias of politics and sectionalism…

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