Mixed Race Studies

Between Cultural Lines

Collide
Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, California
Student Magazine
2011-12-07

Chelsey Barmore, Staff Writer

For some, finding their identities as biracial or multiracial individuals can bring forth challenges. Someone born with blended ethnicities may experience the frequent question of, “What are you?” Mistaken for one race and not recognized for the other may at times create an identity crisis. There’s a pull to identify with one group or another, and sometimes, between multiple ethnicities simultaneously.
 
This is the case for Stephen Gephart, who is German, English, and Hispanic. Gephart, a sophomore applied health major says he’s proud of his Hispanic heritage. He grew up in a Catholic household and was raised by a Spanish-speaking mother. Cooking tamales for Christmas with his family became a memorable time for him. Even though his Hispanic heritage was dominant in his home, Gephart still accepted his English and German nationalities…

…Benjamin Bailey, contributor of the book “Multiracial Americans and Social Class” and an associate professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, explained that several factors could influence the acceptance of personal ethnic identity: physical features, social interactions, and communities.
 
“I think now there are a lot of people in the United States who, with large-scale immigration, don’t fit the traditional categories so there’s more flexibility now,” said Bailey. “At one point, someone could say, ‘I don’t care who you are; you’re black to me.’”
 
Bailey explained that in the past a “one drop rule” was enforced. This rule claimed that any individual with “one drop” of African ancestry was to be considered fully African-American. Today, individuals cannot be fully defined by one ethnicity over another. Even the way a person acts can affect the way one is identified, according to Bailey…

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Blackness Without Ethnicity: Constructing Race in Brazil

Palgrave Macmillan
August 2003
256 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-312-29374-1, ISBN10: 0-312-29374-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-312-29375-8, ISBN10: 0-312-29375-5

Livio Sansone, Vice Director of Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiaticos
Universidade Candido Mendes in Brazil

Drawing on 15 years of research in Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Suriname, and the Netherlands, Livio Sansone explores the very different ways that race and ethnicity are constructed in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. He compares Latin American conceptions of race to US and European notions of race that are defined by clearly identifiable black-white ethnicities. Sansone argues that understanding more complex, ambiguous notions of culture and identity will expand international discourse on race and move it away from American definitions unable to describe racial difference. He also explores the effects of globalization on constructions of race.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: An Afro-Latin Paradox? Ambiguous Ethnic Lines, Sharp Class Divisions, and a Vital Black Culture
• Negro Parents, Black Children: Work, Color, and Generational Differences
• From Africa to Afro: Uses and Abuses of Africa in Brazil
• The Local and Global in Today’s Afro-Bahia
• Funk in Bahia and Rio: Local Versions of a Global Phenomena
• The Internationalization of Black Culture: A Comparison of Lower-Class Youth in Brazil and the Netherlands
• Conclusions: The Place of Brazil in the Black Atlantic

Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops

Duke University Press
2007
360 pages
37 b&w photos, 9 tables
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4037-9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4018-8

Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Associate Professor of Sociology and Latin American and Latina/o Studies
Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts

Black behind the Ears is an innovative historical and ethnographic examination of Dominican identity formation in the Dominican Republic and the United States. For much of the Dominican Republic’s history, the national body has been defined as “not black,” even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. Rejecting simplistic explanations, Ginetta E. B. Candelario suggests that it is not a desire for whiteness that guides Dominican identity discourses and displays. Instead, it is an ideal norm of what it means to be both indigenous to the Republic (indios) and “Hispanic.” Both indigeneity and Hispanicity have operated as vehicles for asserting Dominican sovereignty in the context of the historically triangulated dynamics of Spanish colonialism, Haitian unification efforts, and U.S. imperialism. Candelario shows how the legacy of that history is manifest in contemporary Dominican identity discourses and displays, whether in the national historiography, the national museum’s exhibits, or ideas about women’s beauty. Dominican beauty culture is crucial to efforts to identify as “indios” because, as an easily altered bodily feature, hair texture trumps skin color, facial features, and ancestry in defining Dominicans as indios.

Candelario draws on her participant observation in a Dominican beauty shop in Washington Heights, a New York City neighborhood with the oldest and largest Dominican community outside the Republic, and on interviews with Dominicans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Santo Domingo. She also analyzes museum archives and displays in the Museo del Hombre Dominicano and the Smithsonian Institution as well as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European and American travel narratives.

Table of Contents

• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. “We Declare That We Are Indians”: Dominican Identity Displays and Discourses in Travel Writing, Museums, Beauty Shops, and Bodies
• 1. “It Is Said That Haiti Is Getting Blacker and Blacker”: Traveling Narratives of Dominican Identity
• 2. “The Africans have No [Public] History”: The Museo del Hombre Dominicano and Indigenous Displays of Dominican Identity
• 3. “I Could Go the African American Route”: Dominicans in the Black Mosaic of Washington, D.C.
• 4. “They Are Taken into Account for Their Opinions”: Making Community and Displaying Identity at a Dominican Beauty Shop in New York City
• 5. “Black Women are Confusing, but the Hair Lets You Know”: Perceiving the Boundaries of Dominicanidad
• Conclusion: “Black Behind the Ears, and Up Front, Too”: Ideological Code Switching and Ambiguity in Dominican Identities
• Notes
• References
• Index

The Origins and Demise of the Concept of Race

Population and Development Review
Volume 30, Number 3 (September, 2004)
pages 385-415

Charles Hirschman, Boeing International Professor of Sociology and Professor of Public Affaris
University of Washington

Physical and cultural diversity have been salient features of human societies throughout history, but “race” as a scientific concept to account for human diversity is a modern phenomenon created in nineteenth-century Europe as Darwinian thought was (mis)applied to account for differences in human societies. Although modern science has discredited race as a meaningful biological concept, race has remained as an important social category because of historical patterns of interpersonal and institutional discrimination. However, the impossibility of consistent and reliable reporting of race, either as an identity or as an observed trait, means that the notion of race as a set of mutually exclusive categories is no longer tenable. As a social science term, race is being gradually abandoned. Physical differences in appearance among people remain a salient marker in everyday life, but this reality can be better framed within the concept of ethnicity.

To modern eyes, especially American ones, the reality of race is self-evident. Peoples whose ancestors originated from Africa, Asia, and Europe typically have different appearances in terms of skin color, hair texture, and other superficial features. Although racial differences may be only skin deep, it is widely assumed that races have been a primordial source of identity and intergroup antagonism from the earliest societies to the present, with ancient hatreds, exploitation, and discrimination among the most common patterns. Even in modern societies, which have exposed the myth of racism, race remains a widely used term for socially defined groups in popular discourse—and, in some countries, also in scholarly research, and public policy.

A basic problem, with this perspective is that it is increasingly difficult to define and measure race as a social category. Are Jews a race? What about Muslims in Europe or Koreans in Japan? If Filipinos and Samoans are official races listed in the US census form, why can’t Arab Americans or Middle Easterners be included? And how might the golfer Tiger Woods respond to the standard question about his racial identity?

Although these questions may seem merely pedantic many critical issues of public policy are shaped by the perceptions of racial identities and racial boundaries. Who should be eligible for preferential admission to universities in the United States, Canada, Malaysia, India, South Africa, and other societies that have affirmative action policies? What are the rules for defining the descendants of indigenous peoples who are seeking redress for the expropriation of their ancestral lands in the United States, Canada, and many other countries around the globe? Who decides one’s racial origins—are they based on subjective identity or are there objective criteria that observers can use? These are challenging questions that will tie policymakers and scholars into knots in the coming years as they attempt to take race into account in order to fashion nonracial or postracist societies.

In this essay, I review the history of the concept of race and its ties to social science, including demography. My conclusion (drawing on the work of other scholars) is that race and racism are not ancient or tribal beliefs but have developed apace with modernity over the last 400 years and reached their apogee in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Social science did not originate the belief that innate differences are associated with racial groups, but many social scientists in the Social Darwinist tradition were complicit in the construction and legitimation of racial theories.

In the twentieth century, social scientists made strident efforts to challenge the assumptions and reveal the lack of empirical evidence behind the racial theories of humankind. However, it took epochal events, most notably the specter of Nazi Germany and the nationalist movements of colonized peoples, to weaken the grip of racism as a popular and scientific theory. Although biological theories of race have been largely discredited by these political events and scientific progress, racial identities, classifications, and prejudices remain part of the fabric of many modern societies. I maintain that social science, and demography in particular, have an obligation to show that it is impossible to discuss the issue of race with any logic or consistency without an understanding of the origins and characteristics of racism…

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The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency

Random House, Inc.
2011-08-16
336 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-37789-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-307-45555-0

Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law
Harvard Law School

Timely—as the 2012 presidential election nears—and controversial, here is the first book by a major African-American public intellectual on racial politics and the Obama presidency.
 
Renowned for his cool reason vis-à-vis the pitfalls and clichés of racial discourse, Randall Kennedy—Harvard professor of law and author of the New York Times best seller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word—gives us a keen and shrewd analysis of the complex relationship between the first black president and his African-American constituency.
 
Kennedy tackles such hot-button issues as the nature of racial opposition to Obama, whether Obama has a singular responsibility to African Americans, electoral politics and cultural chauvinism, black patriotism, the differences in Obama’s presentation of himself to blacks and to whites, the challenges posed by the dream of a postracial society, and the far-from-simple symbolism of Obama as a leader of the Joshua generation in a country that has elected only three black senators and two black governors in its entire history.
 
Eschewing the critical excesses of both the left and the right, Kennedy offers a gimlet-eyed view of Obama’s triumphs and travails, his strengths and weaknesses, as they pertain to the troubled history of race in America.

Read an excerpt here.

Table of Contents

The Anglo-Indian Community

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 40, Number 2 (September, 1934)
pages 165-179

Elmer L. Hedin
Halcyon, California

Of the several half-caste croups in Asia, the largest and most self-conscious is the Anglo-Indian Community. It numbers perhaps two hundred thousand persons who maintain themselves precariously on the outskirts of British-Indian officialdom, employed for the most part in clerical and other minor positions under the government. The life of the Anglo-Indian is one protracted struggle for status, occupational and social, and in that struggle he seems to be losing ground. Despised by both British and Indians, he may well be submerged in the turmoil of the present, trampled under by the march of India’s millions toward nationalism.

With the discovery of a sea route to eastern Asia in the last decade of the fifteenth century there began a new era of intimate and exten sive trade relationships between the nations of Europe and those of the Far East. The first European traders belonged to a world in many respects more tolerant than the present one, a world in which race prejudice was almost unknown. Consequently, more often than not they entered into more or less permanent marriage relationships with native women, a custom which resulted, after a few generations of trade and political expansion, in the presence of considerable numbers of half-castes. Such half-castes were in a special position and tended to form self-conscious communities, the largest, the best organized, and the most interesting of which is that community in India variously known as East Indian, Eurasian, or Anglo-Indian.

Some fifteen hundred years before Christ, India was conquered by a people speaking an Aryan language and allied to the present Europeans in blood. Later there were invasions of Greeks, Parthians, and Arabs. As a consequence, there was a not inconsiderable intermixture of invaders’ blood with that of the already hybrid population they found, fought with, and often ruled. But these mixtures took place so long ago that it is not easy to tell what proportion of white and what proportion of dark blood there is in any native of India. Furthermore, it has been and is customary for Europeans to think of all Indians as “colored” without regard to their possible…

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Black Pluralism in Post Loving America

Chapter in: Loving vs. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage

Cambridge University Press
May 2012
300 pages
Hardback ISBN-13: 9780521198585
Paperback ISBN-13: 9780521147989

Edited by

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Rose Cuison Villazor, Associate Professor of Law
Hofstra University

Chapter Author

Taunya Lovell Banks, Jacob A. France Professor of Equality Jurisprudence and Francis & Harriet Iglehart Research Professor of Law
University of Maryland School of Law

The face of late twentieth and early twenty-first century America has changed, as have attitudes about race, especially about persons with some African ancestry. Since 1967, the number of multi-racial individuals with some African ancestry living in the United States has increased dramatically as a result of increased out-marriage by black Americans and the immigration of large numbers of multiracial individuals from Mexico, the Caribbean, as well as Central and Latin America. Many members of the post-Loving generation came of age in the 1990s with no memories of de jure racial segregation laws or the need for the 1960s civil rights legislation to combat overt racial discrimination. Accordingly, they see race, racism and identity through different lens. In other words, we are witnessing a significant generational shift in thinking that is beginning to be reflected in popular culture and scholarly literature about race and identity, but not in the courts. American judges and policy-makers, composed primarily of the children of Brown v. Board of Education, remain stuck in a racial jurisprudence and rhetoric of the late twentieth century.

This chapter analyzes the experiences of and public dialogues about children of interracial parentage and how their differential treatment by non-blacks, as well as blacks, raises legal issues courts are not prepared to address. One emerging question is whether mixed-race individuals are more likely to experience situational blackness—whether one can be black for some but not for other purposes, and if so, when one is black for anti-discrimination purposes. This question is even more sharply drawn when questions about “racial authenticity” arise for individuals whose African ancestry is less apparent. As this chapter explains, the overriding question in both cases is whether interracial parentage confers some type of benefit and disadvantage on Afro-descendant children not experienced by individuals whose formal racial classification is black, and if so whether anti-discrimination law should take these differences into account.

Read the chapter here.

Study: Multiracial groups and social position, segregation in America

The JHU Gazette
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore Maryland
2011-12-19

Amy Lunday, Homewood

The American social hierarchy places people of mixed-race ancestry below whites but above blacks, while additional social stratifications along color lines are simultaneously taking place within the nation’s multiracial groups, according to a Johns Hopkins University sociologist’s study of U.S. Census data.

Pamela R. Bennett, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, studied the residential location of people who identified themselves with more than one racial group when filling out their 2000 and 2010 census forms…

…In both cases, she found that multiracial groups occupy a social position between blacks and whites, and that the multiracial groups themselves have their own racial stratifications. Bennett found a lesser degree of segregation among people who are of both black and white heritage when compared to those whose identities are fully black. Yet the black-white multiracials appear to be more segregated than Asian-white or American Indian–white multiracials across several segregation measures…

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Islands and autochthons: Coloureds, space and belonging in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe (Part 1)

Journal of Social Archaeology
Volume 4, Number 3 (October 2004)
pages 405-426
DOI: 10.1177/1469605304046423

Julia Katherine Seirlis
Department of Anthropology
University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

This article, the first in a two-part series, examines the ramifications of the complex relationships between race and space for definitions of the nation and national identity in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. Most generally, the workings of race and space helped polarize Rhodesia and Zimbabwe between what was set up as ‘white’ and ‘black’, and limit the struggle for power and claims on belonging to those two poles. Racial identity was inscribed into spatial sensibilities and organization so that white space (the city) functioned as a series of islands and black space (the countryside) activated organic assertions of autochthony. More specifically, race and space informed the creation of an intermediate racial category, ‘Coloured’, with no substantive claim to a ‘real’ or ‘full’ identity and with no authoritative claim to the physical soil of the country.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Hybrid and the Social Process

Phylon (1940-1956)
Volume 6, Number 4 (4th Quarter, 1945)
pages 327-336

Jitsuichi Masuoka

An intermixture of blood is an invariable outcome of human migration, contact, and association. To this statement there seems to be no historical exception. Races and peoples, however much they may be physically and culturally dissimilar, if they come together at all, associate to produce individuals of nondescript physical type. In its essence, the hybridization of peoples and races is a biological process, but as it has a wider social implication, it may be studied as a part and parcel of social processes.

A study of changes in genetic factors, as a consequence of racial intermixing, belongs properly to the science of human genetics. Race mixture in its wider ramification is a sociological problem for reasons generally recognized but not always fully understood. Man’s sex appetite, as of all other human impulses, is everywhere culturally channeled, and in this broad sense, one may well speak of race mixture as falling within the orbit of sociology. Moreover, as the intermixture of races runs counter to the existing sex mores of the societies in contact and, as it undermines, in the long run, the pre-existing social order, the problem of race mixture comes to have a sociological rather than biological import. In this way it comes about that the problems of “race mixture” and “race problem” are inseparable in the minds of many; thus, making an objective study of racial hybridization difficult. Race mixing is freighted with heightened emotions and sentiments and intellectual stupidities rampage in this area of discourse. It seems important, therefore, that this problem be examined as a phase of general social process. By viewing it within this wider frame of reference, one may attain a reasonable degree of objectivity toward race mixture.

Much has been written about racial miscegenation by students of biology, psychology, and social sciences. But, the hybrid as a personality type received its first clear definitive statement from Reuter and Park. “The hybrids,” Reuter writes, “tend to be distinct in social position, cultural status, and personality organization: sociologically as well as racially, they are hybrid.” Resulting chiefly from their accessibility to wider cultural opportunities, the mixed-blood individuals occupy the status superior to that of the natives but inferior to that of the whites. However, this superior social position of the hybrid is not to be taken as an evidence of innate intellectual superiority. It should, as Reuter points…