Mixed Race Studies

White Supremacists from 1920s Still Thwarting Virginia Tribes

Indian Country Today Media Network
2011-04-26

Tanya Lee

Congress is once again considering legislation that would grant federal recognition to six of Virginia’s 11 state-recognized American Indian tribes—the Chickahominy, Chickahominy Eastern Division, Nansemond, Rappahannock and Upper Mattaponi tribes and the Monacan Indian Nation. Chief Gene Adkins of the Eastern Chickahominy Tribe said, “We have been working on federal recognition for about 10 years. It is hard for me to understand why it has not gone through like we hoped.”

Virginia Democrat Rep. Jim Moran, sponsor of the House bill that would recognize the tribes, said he introduced the legislation to correct a “travesty of justice. The Virginia Indian tribes have been treated as unjustly as any tribe in the country, and that’s saying a lot. These are the tribes that helped the first English settlers in North America survive. Of all the tribes, they should have been recognized.”

There are three routes to federal recognition—administrative, judicial and legislative, explained Wayne Adkins, president of the Virginia Indian Tribal Alliance for Life and second assistant chief of the Chickahominy Tribe. “The administrative route is very expensive. It’s a long process. Tribes gather documents, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) reviews them and tells tribes what other documents they need, then it’s get in line behind all the other tribes seeking recognition. It could take 30 years and cost $1 million per tribe. Most tribes going for recognition just don’t have that kind of money.”

Walter Ashby Plecker, said Wayne Adkins, is another big reason why going through the BIA process would be difficult for the Virginia tribes. “When Native Americans were given the right to vote [in 1924], Virginia adopted racially hostile laws,” Moran explained. The laws targeted blacks—and, by a quirk of logic—American Indians. Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was one of the most restrictive in the nation, but it was not the only one—30 states passed similar legislation.

Plecker, registrar of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912-1946, was instrumental in crafting that state’s law. He argued that there were no full-blooded Indians left in the state by the early 20th century; therefore, all who claimed Indian heritage were part something else, and he decided the best thing to do would be to lump them in with blacks, since, by his mandate as registrar, a person could claim only one of two racial backgrounds in Virginia: Caucasian or “Negro.” People claiming to be Indians, Plecker said, were r­eally blacks trying to move their families into a position where they could “pass,” or claim to be Caucasian.

Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 outlawed miscegenation, and its intent, quite simply, was to keep Anglo-Saxon blood pure. Wrote Plecker: “For the purpose of this act, the term ‘white person’ shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.… The [terms] ‘Mixed,’ ‘Issue,’ and perhaps one or two others, will be understood to mean a mixture of white and black r­aces, with the white predominating. That is the class that should be reported with the greatest care, as many of these are on the borderline, and constitute the real danger of race intermixture.”…

…Though Social Darwinism and eugenics originated in England, their real champions at the beginning of the 20th century were Americans. Plecker was a zealous eugenicist, advocating both a­nti-miscegenation laws and sterilization of the “unfit,” while also proselytizing that Caucasians and non-Caucasians should be kept separated. As part of his work in the Virginia Statistics Office, he eradicated records of Indian births and marriages in order to support his directive that all Indians were to be categorized as blacks. These are the very records that Virginia’s Indian tribes now need in order to receive federal recognition. Other records of tribal significance were destroyed in fires….

Read the entire article here.

There are Italians with black skin

Africa News
2010-05-28

Stephen Ogongo

Interview with Sabrina Jacobucci, President of Association of Afro-Italian Children

To be black and Italian at the same time is a new reality the Italian society is still struggling to accept.  Adoption and increase in the number of mixed marriages between Italians and Africans are gradually leading to an increase in the number of Black Italian children, the so-called Afro-Italians.  But the Italian society seems unprepared to cater for the social and educational needs of these children.  In this exclusive interview with Africa News, Ms. Sabrina Jacobucci, aka Flora NW, President of the Association of Afro-Italian Children, reveals the reasons that led to the foundation of the Association, the problems mixed heritage children face in the country, and suggests what should be done to make the education system more responsive to the needs of mixed heritage children.

Sabrina, please share with us the story behind the formation of the Association of Afro-Italian Children.

The Association was initiated by an Italian mother of two mixed-race children born abroad, who, when returning to Italy, started to express the need of meeting other black children since they were the only black children in school, in their block, whenever they went to the park or to after school activities. They started to ask: why aren’t there children like us on TV or on advertisements?  The Italian mother started to look for a group where children could meet other black children, but could only find associations of various migrant communities, or churches which catered for the Nigerian, or the Congolese or the Ghanaian and so forth.  The children could not, though, identify with any ethnic or migrant community in particular, being black Italians. So to answer the children’s need to see themselves represented, this woman started to look for other parents of black or mixed-race children to set up a group where the kids could, at least once a month, meet and feel stronger, in a society where to be black is often neither appreciated nor valued.

When was it founded?

A couple of years ago.

Who was involved?

I, the white Italian mum of Black Italian daughters (who also share an English, Nigerian and Jamaican mixed parentage), had the idea of setting up a group where my children could meet other Afro-Italian children. I thought gathering other parents of black children willing to meet would be easy.

Unfortunately, the number of black and mixed-race children is very low in Rome, especially in my area. So I started to “advertise” on the web, first of all on www.insenegal.org, a site which has a rich forum where a number of mothers of children having a Senegalese father write. But most of them weren’t from Rome. So I wrote to other parents’ forum, but they were attended mostly by parents of white children. And then, on one of these forums, I met the adoptive mum of a girl of Nigerian parentage, who shared the same need as mine. We were then joined by other adoptive and biological parents of black and mixed-race children, thanks to the website I manage http://afroitaliani.splinder.com, where I announce our meetings and other activities…

…From your experience, in Italy, are mixed heritage children facing different problems from those of other children?

Mixed race children often face the same issues black mono-heritage children face. No matter their skin tone, they are seen as black and therefore it is healthier and more empowering for them to identify as such, without denying their dual heritage at the same time. A racist is not going to ask them whether they are mixed-race. And yes, black and mixed race children definitely face different problems from those of white children…

…Do you think the education system in Italy fully caters for the needs of mixed heritage children?

I don’t think so. I don’t think the education system has even started to consider or understand the needs of mixed heritage children or of black children for that matter. They are invisible to the system because they are not even seen as a group. Also, mixed heritage is a concept that encompasses too broad a category. Our experience is that of parents of mixed-race children, black/white, and as such they face the same problems of institutional racism embedded in the education system black “mono-heritage” children face. I think that to separate mixed-race children from the black children amounts to “fractioning” the black community, and at this moment, when the community needs unity and strength, is not advisable…

Read the entire interview here.

Mixed Britannia [Review]

Caliban in London: a postcolonial subject in an imperial capital
2011-10-10

Anindya Raychaudhuri, Post-Doctoral Fellow
Department of English Language and Literature
University College London

Caliban in London has previously reviewed part of the BBC’s new Mixed Race season. Thursday evening saw the screening of the first of a 3 part documentary called Mixed Britannia presented by George Alagiah. Using a mixture of archive footage, interviews with members of the community, and interviews with (unfortunately mainly White) academics and other experts, the programme attempts to trace the origins and development of mixed-race communities in Britain.

Mixed Britannia encapsulates both the best and the worst of the BBC. Great use of archival footage and old photographs, meticulously researched, apparently sympathetic interviewing – one knows the strengths of this type of BBC programming, and this example certainly does not disappoint in that area. The producers of the programme clearly attempt to at least appear to b as inclusive as possible, though partly the nature of archive footage means that when profiling mixed-race families, it is the White bit of the family that gets more of the spotlight. For example, what was noticeably lacking was any sense of the lives of these people before they came to Britain, and what ties they and their mixed-race families might or might not have kept with their ‘homelands’.

The bigger problems with this programme are, however, in the narrative. This episode ranged from 1910 to 1939, so it is not yet clear what narrative of current race-relations will be told in future episodes, but in this instance at least, it was very definitely one of ‘we used to be racist, and now we’re all better’. At multiple points in the programme, Alagiah read out excerpts from racist official documents, and invited the audience to share in the typically BBC self-righteous sense of superiority which can leave no room for the recognition that there are strong remnants of such thinking in today’s official policy…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Politics or the Politics of being Multiracial?: Racial Theory, Civic Engagement, and Socio-political Participation in a Contemporary Society

University of Southern California
August 2010
376 pages

Jungmiwha Suk Bullock

A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

This dissertation examines the impacts of historical and contemporary racial theories, socio-political movements, and grassroots mobilization efforts of community-based organizations in transforming the politics to define multiracial identity and the “two or more races” population in the United States. Using an interdisciplinary and mixed methods research approach, I investigate the shifting and contested ways the multiracial population is defined in public and private discourses, paying particular attention to the complexities this community raises within and among monoracial identified communities. Examining the multiracial population in the U.S. has a significant and critical place in the larger trajectory of social scientific scholarship on race, gender, class, and other intersecting identities. This body of research counters the argument that multiple identity formation is inconsequential to theory, civic engagement, and socio-political participation in a contemporary society. This study urges scholars to (re)examine how race and ethnicity continues to be framed, analyzed, interrogated, and understood in ways that are restricted by historically racist/racialized moments that still linger today. These moments, I argue, are sharpened and more pronounced when centering the politics of what it means to claim a multiracial identity in America in the twenty-first century.

Three primary research questions examined in this study are: 1) How do we define the multiracial population in the United States and what do these definitions offer about racial and ethnic ideologies and the future for public policy post-Census 2000?; 2) What critical insights can centering the experiences of multiracial Americans and the efforts to define them on the local, state, and/or national levels (publicly and privately), offer for other groups in American society?; and 3) Under what conditions is it possible to politically mobilize around this shifting and contested category and what are the unmet needs of this emerging population?

The theoretical model for this study was Grounded Theory. Principle data collection methods were the “insider-outsider” and case study research approaches using extensive face-to-face audio and/or photographed interviews; participant and field observations of key local, state, and national events, including U.S. Census proceedings and California Senate Judiciary hearings; and content analysis of primary and secondary documents, including media coverage and organizational archives. Data was collected between 2004 and 2009 in Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, New York, and Sacramento. These cities exhibited the most heightened multiracial activity across the country in this timeframe. I also investigated exclusive, never before documented, behind the scenes initiatives to recognize the unmet needs of this emerging population through an in-depth case study of the Association of MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA)—one of the oldest leading national advocacy organizations for multiracial, multiethnic, and transracially adopted individuals, families, organizations, and allies.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Abstract
• Introduction/Chapter 1: Multiracial Politics or the Politics of Being Multiracial?: The Challenge of Racial Biology and Hegemonoracial Ideology in a Contemporary Society
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 2: The Multi-Whos?: Unpacking the Historical Discourseon Defining the Multiracial Population in the United States Census and in Social Science Research, 1850 to 2000
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 3: Simultaneous Identities: Comparative Interviews Among a Diverse Combination of Multiracial Experiences
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 4: From Manasseh to AMEA: A Case Study of Multiracial Community Building and Grassroots Activism through the Association of MultiEthnic Americans
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 5: Civically Engaging Identities: Keys to Effective Mobilization Toward Building a Collective Multiracial Community
  • Endnotes
• Chapter 6/Conclusion: Beyond the Politics of Being Multiracial: Toward a Revised Theoretical and Pragmatic Approach to Multiracial Presence in the U.S.
  • Endnotes
• Bibliography

List of Tables

1. Racial Designations to Classify Multiracial Identity on U.S. Census Enumeration Schedules (1850 to 2000)
2. Racial Designations to Classify Multiracial Identity on U.S. Census Enumeration Schedules (1850 to 2000) and a Historical Trajectory of Racial and Ethnic Theories in the United States
3. Participants Reported Self-Identification
4. Self-Reported Descriptions Given By Participants on Where Primarily Raised
5. Timeline of the Formation of Multiracial Organizations by Decade

List of Figures

1. Multiracial Births in California, 1997
2. Population Projection Excluding Multiracial Identity in California
3. Intersectionality Diagram
4. Intersectionality + Race/Ethnicity/Culture/Nationality Diagram
5. Multiracial Identity + Intersectionality Flowchart Diagram
6. Multi/Monoracial Identity + Intesectionality Venn Diagram
7. Flowchart of “Mulatto” Identity Formation as Depicted by Michael Davenport in “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics” (1911)
8. AMEA Organizational Structure
9. Multiracial Complexity Web of Identity/ies

Read the entire dissertation here.

How Puerto Rico Became White: Boundary Dynamics and Intercensus Racial Reclassification

American Sociological Review
Volume 72, Number 6 (December 2007)
pages 915-939
DOI: 10.1177/000312240707200604

Mara Loveman, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

Jeronimo O. Muniz
Department of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

According to official census results, the Puerto Rican population became significantly whiter in the first half of the twentieth century. Social scientists have long speculated about the source of this trend, but until now, available data did not permit competing hypotheses of Puerto Rico’s whitening to be evaluated empirically. This article revisits the question of how Puerto Rico whitened using newly available Public Use Micro-Samples from the 1910 and 1920 U.S. Censuses of Puerto Rico. Demographic analysis reveals that racial reclassification between censuses generated a “surplus” of nearly 100,000 whites in the 1920 enumerated population. Previous studies of intercensus change in the racial composition of populations have demonstrated that racial reclassification occurs. Going beyond previous studies, we investigate empirically the underlying social mechanisms that fueled change in categorical membership. Reclassification between censuses may reflect the movement of individuals across racial boundaries (boundary crossing), the movement of racial boundaries across individuals (boundary shifting), or both of these boundary dynamics simultaneously. Operationalization of these conceptually distinct boundary dynamics shows that Puerto Rico whitened in the second decade of the twentieth century primarily through boundary shifting-an expansion of the social definition of whiteness itself. Our analysis helps advance general sociological understanding of how symbolic boundaries change.

Read the entire article here.

The pot that called the kettle white: Changing racial identities and U.S. social construction of race

Identities
Volume 5, Issue 3 (1998)
Special Issue: Foundational Concepts: Gender, Race, and Locality
pages 379-413
DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.1998.9962622

Norberto Valdez, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
Colorado State University

Janice Valdez
Continuing Education Department
Colorado State University

Ethnic and racial identities are deeply enmeshed in broader social processes of change. While ethnicity and race are important factors in consciousness and behavior, they are profoundly affected by the material conditions of life. Conceptually, ethnicity and race are often reified and essentialized, that is, they are attributed qualities that presumably give them independent explanatory power. This study analyzes primary sources to trace how descendants of freed slaves in colonial Virginia emerged as three apparently distinct racial populations. Factors such as national formation, the rise of slavery, and racial typologies all contributed to a restrictive social structure. Yet some individuals and families negotiated aspects of their racial identities through intermarriage, migration, legal processes, and revised genealogies in the search for opportunity. This study attempts to demystify thinking about race and ethnicity by revealing the social forces that influence the form and content of racial and ethnic identity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix [Review: Harman]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Available online: 2011-10-21
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.623133

Vicki Harman, Lecturer in the Centre for Criminology and Sociology
Royal Holloway, University of London

Rainier Spencer. Reproduction Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix, Boulder, CO: Lyne Rienner Publishers, 2010, 355 pp.

From the outset, Reproducing Race promised to be a controversial read. The repeated use of the term ‘mulatto’ (not confined to historical discussions, as is conventional) stood out and created a sense of anticipation at the arguments to follow. This book centres on the significance of Generation Mix, defined as ‘people (typically, but not necessarily, young people) who consider themselves to be the immediately mixed or first generation offspring of parents who are members of different biological racial groups’ (p. 2). Young people who have parents from different racial backgrounds have been celebrated in the media and within much sociological literature as representing a more tolerant and potentially post-racial future. This book offers a critique of celebratory accounts of multi-racialism in the USA and the ideas underpinning the American Multiracial Identity Movement. Rainier Spencer argues that ‘racial ambiguity, in and of itself, is no guarantee of political progressiveness, racial desiabilisation, or, indeed, of anything in particular’ (p. 3). Furthermore, Generation Mix does not radically change the racial order; it simply adds another category because whiteness is still at the top of the racial hierarchy while African-Americans remain at the bottom.

The book is divided into three parts representing different temporal spaces. In part one, ‘The Mulatto Past’, Spencer considers historical portrayals of mulattoes in the USA from the late nineteenth century, drawing on novels, plays, films and academic literature. Chapter 4 is an absorbing discussion of literature by mulatto writers about marginality and racial passing. Such accounts are used to critique the adoption of the marginal man thesis by sociologists, such as Park, Reuter and Stonequist…

The second part, ‘The Mulatto Present’, introduces more contentious arguments about the current racial landscape. Spencer contends that Generation Mix is not new and is in fact indistinguishable from mulattoes, although the American Multiracial Identity Movement attempts to deny ‘mulattoness’. Furthermore, despite celebratory media and academic accounts, members of Generation Mix are not special because African-Americans are also mulattoes, and there is no real difference between those who are recently and historically mixed…

…Notwithstanding the caricature of white mothers, this is a challenging and thought-provoking book, presenting a number of intellectually stimulating and sometimes unusual arguments. In teaching the sociology of race and ethnicity, such a text is likely to act as a useful stimulus. It has the potential to encourage critical engagement with competing perspectives on the significance of racial categories and racial mixing in the past, present and future contexts.

Read or purchase the review here.

Obama’s Racial Identity Is His Call

Poynter.
2008-12-16

Tom Huang, Sunday & Enterprise Editor
The Dallas Morning News
Also Ethics and Diversity Fellow at The Poynter Institute

Not long ago, I sat on a journalism panel in which the question of “What are you?” came up…

…I thought about the “What are you?” question when I read Jesse Washington’s recent Associated Press story about the hubbub surrounding Barack Obama’s racial identity.

Obama self-identifies as African American, because, as he’s explained in the past, “that’s how I’m treated and that’s how I’m viewed. I’m proud of it.”

 It turns out that some people are less than comfortable with that. Some argue that it’s too simplistic to call him “black.” After all, he was raised by his white mother and white grandparents. Others argue that it’s more accurate to identify Obama as “biracial” or “multiracial.”…

…Well, let’s give the individual the power of self-identification. If Obama wants to be identified as “black,” let’s give him that choice. If Tiger Woods wants to be identified as “multiracial” (or “Cablinasian,” for that matter), more power to him.

The reality is we still live in a society in which racial constructs, however antiquated they might be, still matter. They help us be mindful about how our cultural traditions have shaped our identities. They help us remember how centuries of oppression and discrimination shaped our politics, economic divide and social strata…

Read the entire article here.

Sun uses it’s Arsenal to divide us

Lester Holloway
2011-08-17

Lester Holloway, Liberal Democrat Councillor, Journalist & Equality Campaigner
London Borough of Sutton

Top footballers are good at what they do but the Government does not turn to Ashley Cole or John Terry for economic advice. By the same token, their views on race shouldn’t set the agenda. That was my first reaction to the full page devoted to Theo Walcott’s experiences in today’s Sun.
 
I have no issue with the Arsenal and sometime England winger–his history and childhood memories are his own–but when a few paragraphs in his new autobiography are plucked out and spun into a full page in Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper you have to ask: ‘what it going on?’…

…Let’s start with the headline:”People call me black but I’m mixed race.” Again, he’s perfectly entitled to that view, but it’s not one shared by all who recognise that being “mixed race” means you are seen as a person of colour just as those who have two black parents. The political term ‘black’ has never excluded the ‘white side’ of the family, but is in part a uniting umbrella term recognising shared African ancestry. That makes it a term of power–power in numbers and from the spiritual and cultural legacy of the continent.
 
Fracturing a united black community by prizing away “mixed race” people is really about breaking up that power, dividing and ruling. Some of the worst apartheid and colonial regimes have been built upon a colour and shading heirachy, while shadism and the caste system still blights the world today. Clearly Walcott wasn’t trying do advance any of these notions! But I strongly suspect The Sun’s aim was to reduce the size, and therefore the influence, of the black community by emphasising “mixed race” as being seperate from black.
 
I’m not entirely clear what “mixed race” is anyway. I am of mixed parentage, and therefore dual heritage, but I am not a member of any distinct “mixed race”; indeed there is no such thing. Pick two mixed people at random, and I will put money on them having less ancestry in common than if you compared them to any randomly picked person with two black parents. If “mixed race” people are grouped together exclusively on grounds of skin shade, that is quite insulting and not a little “racist!”…

…Walcott is not an activist; I have no expectations of him apart from delivering pinpoint crosses from the touchline (and Lord knows, Arsenal will need plenty of them this season!) It matters not that he grew up in a small Berkshire town and is dating a white young woman. What matters is that we have an holistic debate, and that if papers such as The Sun are going to get excited about a footballer declaring himself mixed race as opposed to black, they should give other perspectives an airing too.
 
Failure to do so can only reinforce suspicions that they–or certainly the rich and powerful in Britain–wish to ensure that the rapidly growing numbers of people of mixed parentage do not identify black. After all, creating difference, tension and envy between black people on the basis of skin colour is a tactic that has been tried and tested for many generations…

Read the entire essay here.

Clench: What are You Fighting For?

Commissioned By: Runnymede Trust-UK’s Leading Race Equality Think Tank
2011
Written and directed by Riffat Ahmed
Produced by Shane Davey, Courtney Edwards, Riffat Ahmed and Fabien Soazandry of Davey Inc
Running Time: 00:15:39

Starring: Hussina Raja as Ash
With: Kevin Morris, Jeff Caffrey, Afreen Mhar, Allan Hopwood, and Danny Randall

Made as part of the Runnymede Trust’s Generation 3.0 project, which looks at how racism can be ended in a generation, this short film tells the story of Ash, a mixed-race girl from Old Trafford, Manchester.

On a youth referral scheme, we see Ash travel to the iconic Salford Lads Club where she takes up boxing as a way of dealing with her troubled past. By portraying Ash’s experience of the sport, the film highlights how the boxing ring can be a neutral space where race and neighbourhood politics are left outside.

The film looks at not only Ash’s own experience of racism, but also the preconceptions she holds about other people and places.

Clench demonsrates how boxing can become the ultimate visual tool for communication between generations, highlighting that every person has a story to tell regardless of how they look.

Music: Sam Baws
Director of Photography: Jake Scott
Sound Design: Ashley Charles
Editor: Vid Price

Supporting Cast: Ezzo DeVaugn, Billy Wain, Kane Hannaway, Charell Anerville, Philip Mulher, Adam Crosby, Sam Walker, Rico Stewart, Dan McCan, Anna Baatz, and Patrick O’Brien

Gaffer: Gwyn Hemmings
Focus Puller: Matt French
Second AC/DIT: Jan Koblanski Bowyer
Sound Recordist: Shaun Hocking
Make up: Sophie Mechlowitz and Leah Tesciuba
Red Camera: HH Films Manchester
Anamorphic Lenses: Nick Gordon Smith
Lighting: Arri Manchester
Colourist: Martin Southworth @ Nice Biscuits

Shot on location in Manchester, England