Mixed Race Studies

Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic

University Press of Florida
2009-07-05
176 pages
6 x 9
Cloth: ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-3374-7, ISBN 10: 0-8130-3374-8
Paper: ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-3675-5, ISBN 10: 0-8130-3675-5

Kimberly Eison Simmons, Associate Professor Anthropology & African American Studies
University of South Carolina

In Latin America and the Caribbean, racial issues are extremely complex and fluid, particularly the nature of “blackness.” What it means to be called “black” is still very different for an African American living in the United States than it is for an individual in the Dominican Republic with an African ancestry.

Racial categories were far from concrete as the Dominican populace grew, altered, and solidified around the present notions of identity. Kimberly Simmons explores the fascinating socio-cultural shifts in Dominicans’ racial categories, concluding that Dominicans are slowly embracing blackness and ideas of African ancestry.

Simmons also examines the movement of individuals between the Dominican Republic and the United States, where traditional notions of indio are challenged, debated, and called into question. How and why Dominicans define their racial identities reveal shifting coalitions between Caribbean peoples and African Americans, and proves intrinsic to understanding identities in the African diaspora.

Navigating the Racial Terrain: Blackness and Mixedness in the United States and the Dominican Republic

Transforming Anthropology
Volume 16, Issue 2 (October 2008)
pages 95–111
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-7466.2008.00019.x

Kimberly Eison Simmons, Associate Professor Anthropology & African American Studies
University of South Carolina

In this article, I draw on the experiences of students who participated in the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) Program in Spanish Language and Caribbean Studies, in Santiago, Dominican Republic, from 2000 to 2004, to situate the seemingly conflicting racial projects of the Dominican Republic and the United States. I discuss how, for African Americans and Dominicans, the question of race is actually very similar when it becomes a question of color as Blackness and mixedness are situated processes that encompass ideas of ancestry as well as phenotypic expression in both countries. I argue that racial discourses, and the politics surrounding race and color, for Dominicans in the United States, and African Americans in the Dominican Republic, is very similar because of historical colorization—which I define as intragroup racial and color-naming practices. I suggest that growing interactions between African Americans and Afro-Dominicans, and a growing understanding of race and the racial systems in both the United States and the Dominican Republic, contribute to how identities are being reconstructed. Particularly, African Americans in the Dominican Republic and Dominicans in the United States encounter a racial dilemma—how one is racially defined within a new national context as categories are often based on the state’s own definitions, series of laws, and informal ways of classifying people based on skin color.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Sociological Implications of Demographic Diversity

Michael Banton, Emeritus Professor of Sociology
Univeristy of Bristol

from

Atlantic Crossings: International Dialogues on Critical Race Theory
C-SAP Monograph Series
2011
283 pages
ISBN: 1 902191 47 1
Edited by: Kevin Hylton, Shirin Housee, Andrew Pilkington & Paul Warmington
pages 154-175
Read the entire book here.

Any consideration of the relevance to the United Kingdom of Critical Race Theory should take account of the special factors in the USA that stimulated and shaped the character of the movement. It should also acknowledge the distinction between social theory and social practice. Social practice has usually to be considered within the frameworks of national institutions, whereas social theory has to promote comparison within and between societies.

In comparing practice in different countries, it is essential to allow for the way in which decisions taken at one point in time limit the alternatives that are available subsequently. Economists and political scientists analyze this limitation as a sign of path dependence. The influence of path dependence upon developments in five states, the USA, France, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom, will be summarised. With creation of the Council of Europe (COE) and the European Union (EU), all five are adopting common policies.

Path dependence

The course of US history was profoundly influenced by an `unthinking decision‟ whereby, as a clergyman complained in 1680, `these two words, Negro and Slave‟ are `by custom grown Homogeneous and Convertible‟ (Jordan 1968:44, 97). The division of the population into blacks and whites established the framework for chattel slavery. To a later generation (e.g. Gross 2008) it appears as if whites in the USA prior to the civil war of 1861-65 thought of their relations with blacks in the terms now known as `racial‟, but in the early decades of that century whites represented blacks as culturally rather than biologically backward and justified slavery primarily on the grounds that it was authorized by the Bible. It was the abolition of slavery that led them to take up doctrines of inherent black inferiority. This change provided the intellectual framework for post-emancipation segregation, and for the power structure that confronted the Civil Rights movement of the nineteen-sixties. That movement further polarized relations between blacks and whites in order thereby to reduce segregation. Because by the nineteen-eighties it appeared as if the gains of the civil rights era were being cut back, the critical legal studies movement was born in the law schools; it developed into Critical Race Theory, which is a movement rather than a theory, and which held its first conference in 1989.

The continuing influence of the black-white division was evident in the US Census of 2000. Question 5 asked `Is this person Spanish / Hispanic / Latino?‟ and required the person answering to tick an appropriate box. Question 6 asked `What is this person‟s race?‟ and offered a set of boxes, beginning with three categories: `White‟, `Black, African Am., or Negro‟ and `American Indian or Alaska Native‟. Question 6 had its origins in a time when attention focused on the categories black and white. Public discourse perpetuates the dichotomy, as if persons of mixed origin and intermediate colour were anomalies. The inauguration of a President who is of equally black and white origin, and of intermediate colour, may help undermine the tendency for the word race to evoke an obsolete conception of distinct social categories…

Read the entire chapter here.

Ladies Remember Elizabeth Taylor, Weigh Modern Beauty Standards

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2011-03-23, 14:00-15:00 EDT (WAMU, 88.5 FM, Washington, D.C.) For other broadcast times, click here.

Farai Chideya, Guest Host

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor has died at the age of 79. The screen icon became a 12-year-old sensation in the movie, “National Velvet”. She went on to star in 53 films, winning two Oscars for her work. In Tell Me More’s occasional “Beautyshop” conversation, guest host Farai Chideya looks back on the Taylor’s life and discusses a new survey on changing notions of beauty in America. Weighing in are Latoya Peterson, editor of Racialicious.com; Galina Espinoza, editorial director of Latina magazine, and Marcia Dawkins, visiting scholar at Brown University.

See: Marcia Alesan Dawkins. “Mixed Race Beauty Gets a Mainstream Makeover,” TruthDig, March 7, 2011.

Listen to the episode here. (00:17:49)

President Underscores Similarities With Brazilians, but Ignores One

The New York Times
2011-03-20

Alexei Barrionuevo

Jackie Calmes

RIO de JANEIRO — From a visit to this city’s most infamous slum to a national address amid the gilded elegance of a celebrated theater, President Obama on Sunday sought to underscore the shared histories and futures of the United States and Brazil, reaching out to the people of one of the most racially diverse countries in the Americas.

But Mr. Obama, on the second day of a five-day tour of Latin America, once again seemed to sidestep mentioning his own racial background in appearances here, even as Brazilians who gathered at a plaza trying to catch a glimpse of him said that he had inspired millions in this country because of his African heritage.

“Because he knows the reality of discrimination against blacks, it would be very important for him to pass on the message that it is possible to get somewhere, to be someone, in spite of all the difficulties,” said Célio Frias, a 46-year-old businessman. “He is an inspiration.”…

…But Brazilians see the issue differently. Brazil was the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery, having done it in 1888. Yet unlike the United States, Brazil never passed Jim Crow segregation laws, and despite the persistence of racism here, many Brazilians take pride in having intermarried more than whites and blacks in the United States.

In the months leading up to his election, Mr. Obama’s popularity soared in Brazil with a wide cross-section of Brazilians. Many proclaimed that Mr. Obama’s gregarious personality made him seem like a Brazilian masquerading as an American, even as many Americans see him as too cool and detached.

“I was moved by his election, I followed everything, saved magazines, newspapers, everything that came out about him,” said Maria Helena Reis, 62, a nurse. “He gives a lot of pride to blacks.”

Opinion polls in the region show that Mr. Obama’s election has also improved Latin American countries’ opinion of the United States as a whole. Among Brazilians, those with a favorable view increased by 16 percentage points from 57 percent in 2008 to 73 percent in 2009, according to Latinobarometro, a polling company in Santiago, Chile. The increase was higher among blacks and those of mixed race surveyed than among whites.

Mr. Obama’s activities on Sunday in Rio—first, his visit to the sprawling City of God favela, or slum, made famous the world over in the 2002 movie that bears its name, followed by a televised speech to a large audience at a historic theater—illustrated the White House’s efforts to take advantage of the president’s unique appeal to the broad and heavily mixed-race Brazilian public…

Read the entire article here.

American Identity in the Age of Obama

Northeastern University
Amilcar Cabral Center in the John D. O’Bryant African American Institute
Boston, Massachusetts
Friday, 2011-03-25, 08:30-15:30 EDT (Local Time)

The election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States has opened a new chapter in the country’s long and often tortured history of inter-racial and inter-ethnic relations. Many relished in the inauguration of the country’s first African American president—an event foreseen by another White House aspirant, Senator Robert Kennedy, four decades earlier. What could have only been categorized as a dream in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education was now a reality. Some dared to contemplate a post-racial America. Still, soon after Obama’s election a small but persistent faction questioned his eligibility to hold office; they insisted that Obama was foreign-born. Following the Civil Rights battles of the 20th century hate speech, at least in public, is no longer as free flowing as it had been. Perhaps xenophobia, in a land of immigrants, is the new rhetorical device to assail what which is non-white and hence un-American. Furthermore, recent debates about immigration and racial profiling in Arizona along with the battle over rewriting of history and civics textbooks in Texas suggest that a post-racial America is a long way off. Indeed, in his 1995 book, Dreams from My Father, Obama observed both how far we have come and how far we yet to traverse.

This conference will provide an opportunity to discuss changing and persistent notions of American identity in the Age of Obama. What roles do race, ethnicity, ancestry, immigration status, locus of birth play in the public and private conversations that defy and reinforce existing conceptions of what it means to be American?

Morning Session 08:30 – 12:00 EDT

Paper 2: “The First Black President?: Cross-racial Perceptions of Barack Obama’s Race”

Matthew Hunt, Associate Professor of Sociology
Northeastern University

David C. Wilson, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations
University of Delaware

Barack Obama’s ancestry can aptly be described as racially-mixed given his “black” Kenyan father and “white” American mother. At the same time, Obama self-identifies as African American and is widely regarded as the country’s first black president. These latter facts, of course, stem from the socially constructed nature of racial identities, America’s malevolent racial history and pattern of racial formation (think “one drop rule”), and (related) contemporary patterns of racial classification and experience. Nonetheless, the nature of Obama’s racial status does not go uncontested in the public arena. African Americans have questioned Obama’s racial authenticity (“Is he Black enough?”). And, among many whites, Obama is seen as something other than truly “black” – a fact that made him more palatable to whites as a candidate and likely contributed to his electoral success. These issues all point to the importance of understanding how and why people view Barack Obama as occupying one or another racial status/category in America. This paper explores these issues empirically via an analysis of 2009 polling data from the Pew Research Center’s “Racial Attitudes in America II” project (N = 2,850). Our analyses center on whether Obama is seen as “black” or “mixed race.” Specifically, we explore how a host of factors – including demographics, concerns about Obama’s political focus on Whites and Blacks, perceptions of discrimination, perceptions of the nature of Obama “values, racial stereotypes, and respondents” own racial identities (including a “mixed race” option) – shape how the public views the President in terms of race. In so doing, we hope to shed light on the ways in which persons’ social locations, identities, and views on racial and societal issues contribute to how Obama’s racial status is constructed by the lay public.

Paper 3: “Racial Identification in a Post Obama era: Multiracialism, Immigration and Identity Choice”

Natalie Masuoka, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Tufts University

In 2008, 2.2% of Americans identified with two or more racial categories. Indeed, assertions of non-traditional identities evoking a mixed race (or multiracial) back-ground are more prevalent in society today, particularly among younger generations. The rise of multiracial identification is indicative of new social norms that govern racial identification which offer a more inviting environment for individuals to assert multiracial identities. Yet, as a trend of multiracial self-identification grows, it demands the attention of those that self-identify with the established racial categories, such as white or black, who must then consider and respond to these identities. I anticipate that response to multiracial identities will vary by racial background. As a general pattern, I argue that whites tend to interpret multiracial identities with normative optimism about U.S. race relations while racial minorities generally respond more unfavorably to the assertions of these identities. Because of this, racial minorities will be more critical of multiracial identities and challenge the legitimacy of these identities. Using recent public opinion data, I examine the relationship between views on multiracial identities and other racial and political attitudes and compare how this relationship may differ across whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians.

For more information, click here.

Census serves up racial buffet in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley Mercury News
2011-03-20

Joe Rodriguez

Who are you? What are you?

Sara Phillips, a 20-year-old computer science student from Hawaii at Santa Clara University, just may have the new look of the 21st century. When her 2010 Census form arrived last year, she gazed at the variety of ethnic and racial boxes available to her and selected four: Spanish and Filipino, same as her mother; and Japanese and white from her father’s lineage.

“I always mark as many as I can,” she said.

Choosing from this racial buffet made her one of about 87,300 people living in Santa Clara County who claimed more than one race, according to the latest results released by the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s an increase of about 9,000 from the past decade…

…Advocates, including the Berkeley-based Association of Multi Ethnic Americans, started lobbying for the distinction in the late 1960s, arguing in part that the blending of races eventually would transcend racial divisions. Curiously, some odd bedfellows opposed them.

On one side, cultural conservatives said another racial category would Balkanize America and stifle the dream of a colorblind society. On the other, traditional black, Asian and Native American groups feared the new category would dilute their numbers and political clout.

For better or worse, the mixed-race genie is out of the bottle, said professor Matthew Snipp, a sociologist who heads the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University.

“It’s going to continue to grow, and how fast is anybody’s guess,” he said. At the same time, “It’s still a relatively small part of the population.”

Although he has some Irish blood, Snipp is Native American and marked only that box on his own census form. He said the key issues in the mixed-race question still are alive and meaty.

For example, he said, federal anti-discrimination laws name and protect traditional minority groups, but not multiracial people. The Census Bureau is the only agency that collects such information. When a federal health agency wants to know which racial populations need attention and where, Census Bureau computers assign mixed-race people to one of the traditional racial groups and hands the recoded counts to the agencies.

“The bigger issue is that we still have laws in place to combat discrimination that still exists,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

Identifying with Multiple Races: A Social Movement that Succeeded but Failed?

PSC Research Report (Report No. 01-491)
The Population Studies Center (PSC) at the University of Michigan
2004
33 pages

Reynolds Farley, Research Professor Emeritus
University of Michigan
Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research

Prior to the 1960s, civil rights organizations sought to minimize the collecting of racial information since such data were often employed to deny opportunities to minorities. By 1970, federal agencies and courts frequently used racial information to enforce civil rights laws by ensuring the minorities were appropriately represented in jobs or in schools and that equitable electoral districts were drawn. In the 1970s, advocacy groups struggled over racial definitions. In 1977, the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) defined official races and mandated the gathering of data about them. A decade later a small but highly effective multiracial movement emerged. They contended that many Americans come from several racial backgrounds and should be permitted to identify with a multiracial category. OMB, in 1997, altered the federal regulations, recognized five major races and gave everyone the option to identify with as many races as the wish.

The Census of 2000 adopted the principle that persons could identify with more than one race. About 2.4 percent–or one in 40–did so. Approximately one-third of these were multiracial because they wrote a Spanish-term for their second race. That is, 1.6 percent of the population or 4.5 million marked two or more of the five major races defined by OMB. White/Other, and White/Indian were the only multiracial groups marked by one million or more.

These innovative multiracial data have not provoked litigation nor bitter controversies as legislatures analyzed census information to reapportion electoral districts. Before to the enumeration, advocacy groups strongly endorsed the use of a multiracial category but they have not highlighted this issue now that data are becoming available from the Census. The multiracial movement succeeded in fundamentally changing the way the government collects racial data but, thus far, there are no great changes in outcomes nor are there prominent pending lawsuit focused on the rights of multiracial.

Read the entire report here.

Race or mongrel: a brief history of the rise and fall of the ancient races of earth: a theory that the fall of nations is due to intermarriage with alien stocks: a demonstration that a nation’s strength is due to racial purity: a prophecy that America will sink to early decay unless immigration is rigorously restricted

L. C. Page and Company
1908
399 pages

Alfred P. Shultz

Table of Contents

I. The Mongrel in Nature
II.  The Mongrel in History
III. The Hamites in India
IV. The Chaldeans
V.  The Phoenicians
VI.  The Carthaginians
VII.  The Egyptians
VIII. The Jews
IX.  The Gipsies
X.  The Hindoos
XI.  Hellas
XII. The Greeks
XIII. The Pan-European Mongrel in Rome
XIV. Sicily
XV. The Lombards in Italy
XVI.  Heredity and Language
XVII. Race Problems in German Lands
XVIII. The South American Mongrel
XIX.  The Monroe Doctrine
XX.  The Yellow Races
XXI.  The Anglo-Saxons
XXII. The Anglo-Saxons in America
XXIII. Immigration: Who in America?
XXIV. Immigration: Men or the Balance-sheet?
XXV. Immigration: Anglo-Saxons and Germans
XXVI. Immigration: The German-Americans
XXVII.   Immigration: The Pan-European in America
XXVIII.  The American Negro
XXIX.  Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Sometimes there is a physical impossibility preventing the male clement from reaching the female ovule, as is the case with a plant having a pistil too long for the pollen tubes to reach the ovarium. It has also been observed that, when the pollen of one species is placed on the stigma of another species, though the pollen tubes protrude, they do not penetrate the stigmatic surface.

The male element may reach the female element, but be incapable of causing an embryo to be developed. A great many of the few embryos which develop after crossing perish at a very early period. The early death of the embryo is a frequent cause of the sterility of first crosses.

Of the very few embryos that are normal at delivery a great many die within the first days of their life. Darwin writes: 11 Mr. Salter has given the result of an examination of about five hundred eggs produced from various crosses between three species of Gallus and their hybrids; the majority of these eggs had been fertilized, and in the majority of the fertilized eggs the embryos had either been partially developed and had then perished, or had become nearly mature; but the young chickens had been unable to break through the shell. Of the chickens which were born, more than four-fifths died within the first few days or, at latest, weeks, without any obvious cause, apparently from mere inability to live; so that from five hundred eggs only twelve chickens were reared.”

???own. Turn the domestic animals loose, leave them to nature, and in ten years no mongrel will exist. From the foregoing considerations we derive this conclusion:

Nature prevents the development of the mongrel; in the few cases in which nature has for the time being successfully been outraged and a mongrel produced, nature degrades that mongrel mercilessly and in time stamps it out.

Nature suffers no mongrel to live.

Read “The Origin of Species,” by Charles Darwin…

The intermarriage of people of one colour with people” of another colour always leads to deterioration. Prof. Agassiz says, ” Let any one who doubts the evil of the mixture of races, and is inclined from a mistaken philanthropy to break down all barriers between them, come to Brazil. He cannot deny the deterioration consequent upon an amalgamation of races, more widespread here than in any country in the world, and which is rapidly effacing the best qualities of the white man, the negro, and the Indian, leaving a mongrel nondescript type, deficient in physical and mental energy.

The most favourable opinion held in regard to the white-Indian half-breeds in Brazil is very poor. They are a lazy and a troublesome class, and much inferior to the original stock. (From ” Brazil,” by C. C. Andrews.)

Darwin notes in half-breeds a return toward the habits of savage life. He says: ” Many years ago, before I thought of the present subject, I was struck with the fact that in South America men of complicated descent between negroes, Indians, and Spaniards rarely had, whatever the cause might be, a good expression.” Livingstone, after speaking of a half-caste man on the Zambesi, described as a rare monster of inhumanity, remarks: “It is unaccountable why half-castes such as he are so much more cruel than the Portuguese; but such is undoubtedly the case.” Humboldt speaks in strong terms of the bad character of the Zambos, or half-castes between Indians and negroes, and this conclusion has been arrived at by various observers. An inhabitant of Africa remarked to Livingstone, that God made the white man, God made the black man, but the devil made the half-castes…

Read the entire book here.

The Mestizos of South Carolina

The American Journal of Sociology
Volume 51, Number 1 (July 1945)
pages 34-41

Brewton Berry

There are several communities of white-Indian-Negro hybrids in South Carolina, the members of which do not fit into the biracial caste system upon which the state’s whole social structure is built. Similar groups are found in other states. Some of these are amalgamating with the Negroes, while others have won an intermediate status as “Inidans.” Those in South Carolina have resisted both of these accommodations and have persistently fought for white status. Their present position in etiquette and is local institutions, such as churches and schools, is a particular one, being the status of neither Negroes nor whites.

There are in South Carolina today fully five thousand people—perhaps even ten thousand—who do not fit into the biracial caste system upon which the state’s whole social structure is built. These out-castes insist that they are white, and they claim the privileges and courtesies of white people. Some of them, if pressed, will not deny a strain of Indian, though they take no pride in the fact; and most of them are offended even at that suggestion. The dominant whites, on the other hand, are convinced that there is a trace of Negro blood in them and, on the theory that “one drop of Negro blood makes one a Negro,” are reluctant to accept them and regard their claim to white status with various and mixed emotions, ranging from amusement to horror.

This failure of a sizable group of people to fit into the social system creates many problems. It is, in fact, a threat to the whole structure, undermining the popular faith that the system functions adequately and will continue to function forever. “We simply cannot admit them to the white schools,” confessed one trustee, “because, if we did, pretty soon the Negroes would want to come in, and then where would we be?” The same question arises with respect to churches, hospitals, political parties, parks, playgrounds, moving pictures, hotels, restaurants, clubs, and cemeteries. These institutions, in all of which rigid racial segregation is the rule, are operated upon the assumption that every person is either white or black and that there are absolute criteria to determine in which group one belongs. It is so with regard to the etiquette of race relations. “I wish you would tell me what these Brass Ankles are,” said a bank teller, “so I would know whether to ‘mister’ them or not.” Most disturbing of all is the threat to the assumed purity of the white race; for if these doubtful ones are being absorbed without dire consequences, as seems to be the case, what is to prevent an inundation of Negro blood?

These outcastes, whom I call “mestizos,” are designated by a wide variety of names, none of them flattering. In Richland County they are known as “Red Bones.” In one section of Orangeburg County they are “Red Legs”; in another, “Brass Ankles.” The degrading name “Brass Ankle” is also commonly used in Dorchester, Colleton, Berkeley, and Charleston counties. In Sumter they arc called “Turks”; in Bamberg, “Buckheads”; while in Marlboro, Dillon, Marion, and Horry they are “Croatans,” a name that is sometimes shortened to the even more unflattering “Cro.” In Chesterfield they are known as “Marlboro Blues,”a slur on the adjoining county, whence they came. In some localities…

Read or purchase the article here.