Mixed Race Studies

Roundtable with Fanshen Cox, Dr. Ulli Ryder, and Dr. Marcia Dawkins

Blogtalk Radio
Tuesday, 2011-08-09, 22:00Z (18:00 EDT)

Michelle McCrary, Host
Is That Your Child?

Fanshen Cox, Actress, Educator, Founder and Producer of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, co-host Mixed Chicks Chat

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Ulli K. Ryder, Visiting Scholar
Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America
Brown University

From the New York Times to CNN to Hollywood actresses, it seems that everyone is talking about mixed race people and interracial relationships. Amidst the celebratory tones of much of this coverage and ill-advised celebrations of a “post-racial” America,  there seems to be a slow-burning backlash. 

The mainstream’s problematic framing of mixed race identity and of the “mixed experience” seems to be stoking the fires of this discontent.  In this podcast roundtable hosted by ITYC, we hope analyze the mainstream coverage of mixedness and multiracial identity to find out where it goes off the rails and what, if anything, it gets right.  This podcast roundtable is only a small piece of the kind of meaningful exchange we hope that people will continue to have about the issue both on and offline.

Each of our panelists will share their personal experiences with the mainstream treatment of multiracial/mixed identity as well as any backlash they’ve experienced.   They’ll also offer some strategies for having more nuanced, contextual  conversations about “the mixed experience.”

To download the audio of the roundtable discussion, click here (01:01:12, 14MB).

My academic research is on racial categories in national censuses.  When I first started reading about the push to get a “mixed-race” category on the U.S. census in the 1990s, I was absolutely on the side of the multiracial movement. I thought the census should recognize our identities, no matter how complicated they may be.  Then I kept reading and realized that the multiracial activists were only concerned with recognition and didn’t care that it potentially came at the expense of civil rights agendas.  Being counted is crucial in the U.S.—and elsewhere. It is linked to money, political power, grassroots mobilization and even community cohesion.  Having a separate mixed-race category threatened all that—and the hard-fought victories of the civil rights movement.  The multiracial organizations that testified before Congress in the 1990s were mostly white mothers of multiracial children who did not want their children to have to choose one race over another.  But they failed to recognize what else was at stake—though the census was once an instrument used to manage and control racial populations, it now has a political power that racial minorities can access and use to advance their claims. The entire U.S. civil rights regime rests on the idea of discrete racial categories. One group’s recognition could lead to another’s oppression.  But the mixed-race activists didn’t care—they went on to argue (unsuccessfully) for their cause and even struck alliances with Republicans, including Newt Gingrich, whose ten steps for better race relations in the U.S. included adding a multiracial category to the census and doing away with affirmative action.

Debra Thompson, “The language and the Ethics of Mixed Race,” In Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out, edited by Adebe De Rango-Adem and Andrea Thompson (Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2010), 267.

Latinos are “Mixed,” Too

News Taco: The Latino Daily
2011-07-14

Chantilly Patiño, blogger
Bicultural Mom

Most times, Americans don’t think of Latinos as being mixed or multicultural, but in reality Latinos are leaders of multiculturalism and mixed families.  Start off with the fact that most Latinos come from a combination of European and Native ancestry, a mixing that began with the colonization of the Americas.

But beyond that there are other historical mixings, including African ancestry, Latinos in the U.S. are also in the unique position of straddling the borders of two dominating cultures, popular American culture and that of their own Latino heritage.  This puts Latinos in an excellent position to understand a variety of perspectives and address multiculturalism with ease…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Season

BBC Press Office
BBC Two Summer & Autumn 2011
Diverse, stimulating and rewarding television on BBC Two
2011-06-22

Mixed-race Britain is put under the spotlight this autumn in a collection of revealing new programmes. With a mix of drama and documentaries, the season provides a window into the varied lives of mixed-race people living in the UK and helps us understand what the increase in mixed-race people means for the way we live in Britain today.

Mixed Britannia

George Alagiah explores the remarkable and untold story of Britain’s mixed-race community in a new three-part series uncovering a tale of illicit love, tragedy and triumph.

With previously unseen material and unheard testimony, charting events from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, George examines the social factors that have influenced the shape of today’s mixed-race Britain. He discovers the love between merchant seamen and liberated female workers; how the British eugenics movement physically examined mixed-race children in the name of science; how pioneering white couples adopted mixed-race babies; and how Britain’s mixed-race population exploded with the arrival of people from all over the globe—making it one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the UK…

…Mixed Race

This documentary explores the historical and contemporary social, sexual and political attitudes to race mixing. From the strict application of “anti-miscegenation” laws in the USA and South Africa to the emergence of Mestizo cultures in the colonies of South America, the programme examines the complex history of interracial relationships around the world…

For more information, click here.

The Politics of Multiracialism with Dr. Ralina Joseph

Voxunion
2010-03-23

Jared A. Ball, Host and Associate Professor of Communication Studies
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

Ralina L. Joseph, Associate Professor of Communications
University of Washington

The struggles surrounding the politics of identity seem at new heights these days and to help bring some historical context we spoke with Dr. Ralina Joseph who joined us for a discussion of her recent article for Black Scholar, “Performing the Twenty-first Century Tragic Mulatto: Black, White, And Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, by Rebecca Walker.” We also discussed the politics of multiracial identity in terms of the history of the “tragic mulatto,” the upcoming census and Barack Obama.

Listen to the interview here (00:32:44).

Mixed Messages: Barack Obama and Post-Racial Politics

Spectator (Journal of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematics Arts)
Volume 30, Number 2 (Fall 2010)
pages 9-17

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

The election of President Barack Hussein Obama marks an important milestone in United States racial politics. Many cultural critics and opinion leaders argue that Obama’s popularity and position represent post-racial accomplishments for the nation.

In this article I argue that post-racial politics, the ideology that race and/or racism is dead, ignores the salient fact that we continue to live in a society deeply influenced by race, with material consequences that affect life chances. I support this argument through an examination of Obama’s racial rhetoric in the address of March 18, 2008 “A More Perfect Union.” Through Obama’s uses of mixed race identity, the speech acknowledges the actual history of racial injustice and the ideal future of racial reconciliation through frank deliberation and political intervention, and thus serves as a prologue to racial dialogue rather than a post-racial epilogue or monologue.

The 21st century has ushered in a set of paradigm shifts that are responding to changes in technology, economics, politics, cultural flows, and narratives of identification. From the advent of social media, to the Great Recession, to health care reform, to the revised racial categories on the U.S. Census, American lives are faced with increasing tensions and ambiguities. No single icon reflects these tensions and ambiguities, and the paradigm shifts they are inspiring, more cohesively than President Barack Obama.

Some critics argue that Obamas election to the Presidency and status as global “supercelebrity” are signs that we have entered a post-racial moment in which everyone and everything is mixed. “Watching Obama campaign with his African American wife, his Indonesian-Caucasian half-sister, his Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law…all of their children,” not to mention the memories of his Kenyan father and white American mother and grandparents from Kansas, is evidence of this mixed, and ultimately post-, racial moment. Census statistics support this view, revealing that the population of multiracial children in the United States has soared from approximately 500,000 in 1970 to more than 6.8 million in 2000, and that they are happier than their mono-racial counterparts.

As a result of this mixing, many now question the existence of racial prejudice and discrimination writ large. In a recent interview with CNNs John King, President Obama was asked about the role he thinks race and racism play in his political reception. The President suggested that while racism exists, it lives more so in our imaginations than our intentions. If post-racial proponents are interpreting Obamas words and images correctly, then we may be on the verge of entering an era in which discriminatory racial barriers, partisan emotions and divisiveness have been dismantled. Put bluntly, in post-racial America, racism will be dead. If post-racial proponents are incorrect, then our dream of a post-racial America is a myth that both constrains and contains an ongoing drama concerning multiracialism, identity, and Obamas ability to change national public policy. In either case Obama is, as Peggy Orenstein claims, our emblematic “mixed messenger.” In the pages that follow I will engage post-racial politics by asking and answering three questions: What does post-race mean? How does Obamas racial rhetoric address a post-race perspective? And, what are the implications of Obama’s iconic racial status for U.S. racial politics?…

…In this article I argue that post-racial politics, the ideology that race and/or racism is dead, ignores the salient fact that we continue to live in a society deeply influenced by race, with material consequences that affect life chances. I support this argument through an examination of Barack Obamas racial rhetoric in his address of March 18, 2008—”A More Perfect Union”—perhaps the most climactic moment of his first Presidential campaign…

…In addition, those of African ancestry were the subjects of pseudo-scientific racist studies concluding they were soulless beasts, a threat to civilization itself, a drain on the economy, and a generally cursed people. These sinister images became the basis for a biological theory known as “hybrid degeneracy,” which claimed that mixed race people were emotionally unstable, irrational, recalcitrant, and sterile. According to Robyn Wiegman, this theory became a biological fact in Western discourse based on pseudo-scientific observation and comparative anatomy, especially of the brain, skull, and reproductive organs. As a result of these sociological and pseudo-scientific findings, white/European Americans were instructed to dissociate from African Americans in social life in order to maintain their purity. It is therefore unsurprising that blacks and whites who dared to cross the color line in any way, whether to attend school, vote, or mix with one another romantically, were the subjects of torture and abuse. Such physical and juridical policing of the color line is why the study of mixed race identification remains important to any discussion of racial and post-racial politics. Moreover, those of mixed race who passed as either white or black demonstrated that the color line promoted suffering on both sides and in the spaces in-between, making it at the same time all too real and extremely unstable…

Read the entire article here.

“My Daughter Married a Negro”: Interracial Relationships in the United States as Portrayed in Popular Media, 1950-1975

Journal of Undergraduate Research
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse
Volume VIII (2005)
13 pages

Melissa Magnuson-Cannady

Between 1948 and 1967, thirty states either repealed their anti-miscegenation laws or the states’ laws themselves were struck down as unconstitutional by the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision. Although these laws were slowly being annulled, interracial relationships, especially Black-White relationships, were still considered taboo in much of the country. This research project critically examines how mainstream America thought about interracial relationships during and after those years as portrayed in popular culture media outlets such as popular magazines and periodicals, newspapers, and one major film. The articles and productions reveal both continuity and change over time and that many of those articles and productions were reactions to national events and court cases. After examining various articles it becomes clear that as more states repealed laws banning interracial relationships, more people accepted interracial relationships as long as interracial couples did not move into their neighborhoods, or involve their children. Currently, while there is an ever-increasing population of people involved in interracial relationships, this fact is not widely depicted in advertisements, on television, or in movies, revealing vestiges of an out-dated taboo.

INTRODUCTION

The author of “My Daughter Married a Negro” chose not to reveal his identity when he wrote this story detailing his family’s ordeal with their daughter marrying across the color line.1 But his story reveals that he and the rest of his family and their friends and neighbors did indeed have issues with the marriage. In fact, with the many references to the Second World War and to war in general, it seems as though he feels that he is fighting a war against the interracial union. This article was one of many articles published between 1950 and 1975 that portrayed both a reluctance to allow such relationships and a slow eventual acceptance of interracial relationships. Even the fact that he chose to remain anonymous and hide the fact that his daughter was marrying a black man from his co-workers speaks volumes about the general thoughts and notions about interracial marriages during the early 1950s. In fact, at the time this article was published and for years after, antimiscegenation laws were still widely practiced and enforced in the majority of the states in the South and the West of the United States. These laws were used to prohibit racial mixing, or amalgamation so to ensure the superiority and purity of the white race, to maintain the hierarchy of slave or free during the centuries of slavery, and to regulate property transmission. Such antimiscegenation laws predated the United States of America and continued to regulate relationships, race, and property transmission for a long time—less than forty years ago many states still had laws that banned the marriage of a white person to a person of any other race. Many of these laws were in place for decades, or even centuries, while other states had more recently passed their laws during the twentieth century…

Racial equality leading to mixed marriages and then to children of mixed racial descent was one of the driving forces behind preventing school integration. The September 19, 1958 issue of U.S. News & World Report published as its cover story “What South Really Fears about Mixed Schools: Leading Sociologists Discuss Sex Fears and Integration.” This article, along with the “Mixed Schools and Mixed Blood” article blatantly reveal the South’s real fear about integration. The sociologists’ views varied greatly. One stated, “…about the last person in the world that the average white kid would really seriously get interested in would be a Negro.” Another stated that although school integration may not directly lead to intermarriage, it will definitely lower the barriers to such relationships.51 Another leading sociologist argued that interracial relationships and sex are used to oppose integration, but that it “may not be the real reason but merely one that is easily understood and useful for the opposition. He then argued that the real reasons may have to do with social and political mobility of Negroes—that better educated Negroes would rock the world of politics in the South and that would eventually lead to whites loosing status and privilege in society. Still another sociologist, when answering the question, “Do you think that white parents are afraid their daughters may become interested in Negro boys, or their sons might become involved with Negro girls?” responded with,

Their sons have clandestinely been involved with Negro girls and women for over 200 years, and the evidence can be seen in the form of light mulattoes in almost every Southern and Northern City.

Public opinion accepts this fact, however, as not endangering the purity of the white race so long as the mixing does not involve the incorporation of the mixed-blood children in the father’s group. Of course, legal marriage with colored women would violate this principle, and this is why it is forbidden by law in every Southern State and in many non-Southern States.

With the daughters of white parents, it is a very different matter. Motherhood is concealed only with great difficulty. An old saying of the frontier has it that motherhood is a matter of fact but fatherhood is a matter of opinion. Hence it is through the woman that the white group lays down its rules of race membership.

This statement, very similar in many ways to Peggy Pascoe’s explanation of interracial relationships, shows why interracial marriage, but not interracial sex, is banned by law in many states, and how race and sex compound to further subjugate black women of the South. This statement reveals the sick truth that while white male slave owners had supreme control over his slaves, and later sharecroppers, and women in general in the South, black men had almost no power—not even to protect their female family and friends from the possible horrors of the white man. And, while not all of the relationships resulting in mixed children were based on this imbalance of power that resulted in rape, many surely were purely by the definition of rape itself. This statement reveals the ugly, horrible truth about one aspect of race relations in the South…

Read the entire article here.

Intermarriage and racial amalgamation in the United States

Biodemography and Social Biology
Volume 14, Issue 2 (1967)
pages 112-120
DOI: 10.1080/19485565.1967.9987710

David M. Heer, Professor Emeritus of Sociology
University of Southern California

Within the last few years tremendous popular interest has been aroused in the subject of Negro-white intermarriage. Fifteen years ago Negro protest leaders claimed they were interested only in jobs and votes and consequently downplayed talk of intermarriage. Moreover, conservative whites were comforted by Gunnar Myrdal’s report that although the ban on intermarriage was for them the most important aspect of the caste system, Negroes considered it the least important of the various discriminations they were forced to suffer. Very recently, however, the attitude on the part of many Negro leaders toward intermarriage has changed. Increasingly, such leaders, particularly the younger ones, are saying, “Why not?”

Earlier, most Negro thinking tended to isolate political and economic discriminations from the social discriminations symbolized, par excellence, by white attitudes toward racial intermarriage. However, in the writer’s opinion, such thinking represented faulty sociological analysis. A more thorough view of the situation reveals that restrictions on racial intermarriage may well be closely linked to the economic discrimination that Negroes in our society must endure. Davis (1949) has listed the main social functions of the family as the reproduction, maintenance, placement, and socialization of the young. Let us focus our attention on the placement function of the family in the contemporary United Stales, i.e. on the consequences which birth into a given family has for the youngsters future social position. Let us first remember that the transfer of wealth in our society is largely accomplished by bequeathal from one family member to another. The possession of wealth in our society not only entitles one to receive regular monetary interest; it is also a source of power, credit, and prestige. Secondly, it must be recognized that although universalism is the predominant criterion for the matching of job applicants to job vacancies in our society, particularism is quite important for many segments of it. In particular, in the building trades, jobs cannot be obtained without admittance to the union’s apprenticeship program and in many instances it is almost impossible to obtain entree into the apprenticeship program unless one is a son or other close relative of a union member. Third, social science research has established that entree to elite positions in our society is most easily obtained by those who grow up from birth in a family having relatively high status.  Birth in a high status family, of course, provides the financial means for obtaining advanced education. In addition, however, it is invaluable for giving one a sense of familiarity with the activities and functioning of high status society. This familiarity not only reduces the fear of interpersonal contacts in such a society but also increases the motivation to become a full participant…

Read or purchase the article here.

CNN DIALOGUES: The 2010 Census and the New America?

The Cecil B. Day Chapel of The Carter Center
 453 Freedom Parkway, Atlanta, GA, 30307
2011-08-31, 19:00-20:30 EDT (Local Time)

Moderator:
Wolf Blitzer, CNN’s Lead Political Anchor and Anchor of “The Situation Room”

Panelists:

Heidi W. Durrow, author of the debut novel The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
Edward James Olmos, actor and activist
Yul Kwon, Host of PBS’ “America Revealed”
Kris Marsh, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland at College Park
Dana F. White, Goodrich C. White Professor of Urban Studies at Emory University

If numbers don’t lie, what can the 2010 U.S. Census tell us about who we are and how we live? On August 31st, thought leaders in sociology, urban studies, and popular culture will come together in front of a live audience at The Carter Center in Atlanta to explore the implications of the 2010 census in the premiere session of CNN DIALOGUES.

This event, hosted by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, will feature Heidi Durrow, Edward James Olmos, Yul Kwon, Kris Marsh and Dana F. White.  This is the first in a series of three CNN DIALOGUES planned for 2011.

For more information, click here.

The Arabs of Africa

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 6, Issue 1 (1972)
pages 1-9
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.1972.9969036

Ali Mazruia, Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities
State University of New York, Binghamton

The combination of acculturation and inter-mating between races might be called a process of biocultural assimilation Some degree of integration between groups is achieved by the process of mixing blood and fusing cultural patterns. There are two concepts here which need to be further refined. One is the concept of symmetrical acculturation and the other is the concept of symmetrical miscegenation. Symmetrical acculturation arises when a dominant group not only passes on its culture to the groups it dominates but is also significantly receptive to the cultural influence of its subjects or captives.

There have been occasions in history when acculturation has been asymmetrical, and yet the receiving group has been the politically dominant. The classical example is that of Greek influence on the Roman conquerors. A more common example is the kind of asymmetry in which the politically dominant culture transmits itself to its subjects and captives and receives little in return. The British cultural influence in much of Africa has been of the second category. We might call this descending asymmetry, and call the Greek-Roman example a model of ascending asymmetry.

As for symmetrical miscegenation, this would arise in a situation where two racial communities inter-marry and produce a comparable number of both men and women who crossed the racial boundary to seek partners from another community. In very isolated circumstances, and even there with some qualifications, such symmetry is conceivable, where one race or ethnic group is patrilineal and the other is matrilineal. The matrilineal group might not mind its women crossing the border and marrying men from the other country. The patrilineal group, in like manner, might permit the men to be exogamous. By the matrilineal race the child is regarded as sharing the race of its mother; while the patrilineal wing recognises the child’s racial affinity to its father. Tensions in such situations are conceivable, precisely in the duality of citizenship and the pulls of potentially conflicting loyalties. A much more prevalent phenomenon is that of asymmetrical miscegenation. In the great majority of cases where black people have inter-married with non-black people, a lack of symmetry has been a continuing characteristic. In this paper, we shall pay special attention to racial mixture as between the Arabs and black Africans. We are going to do this in a broad comparative perspective, relating the Afro-Arab experience to the different histories of racial mixture in the United States, in Latin America and in South Africa. These three, when combined with the Afro-Arab model, provide four distinct patterns of the relationship between miscegenation and social structure.

All four models of miscegenation are asymmetrical but In significantly different ways. In each case the dominant ethnic group has produced many more husbands in the racial mixture than wives. Over 70% of the so-called black population of the United States has white blood. But overwhelmingly the white blood has come through white males rather than white females…

Read the entire article here.