Mixed Race Studies

Choosing Race: Multiracial Ancestry and Identification

Social Science Research
Volume 40, Issue 2 (March 2011)
pages 498–512
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2010.12.010

Aaron Gullickson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Oregon

Ann Morning, Assistant Professor of Sociology
New York University

Social scientists have become increasingly interested in the racial identification choices of multiracial individuals, partly as a result of the federal government’s new “check all that apply” method of racial identification. However, the majority of work to date has narrowly defined the population of multiracial individuals as the “biracial” children of single-race parents. In this article, we use the open-ended ancestry questions on the 1990 and 2000 5% samples of the U.S. Census to identify a multiracial population that is potentially broader in its understanding of multiraciality. Relative to other studies, we find stronger historical continuity in the patterns of hypodescent and hyperdescent for part-black and part-American Indian ancestry individuals respectively, while we find that multiple race identification is the modal category for those of part-Asian ancestry. We interpret this as evidence of a new, more flexible classification regime for groups rooted in more recent immigration. Our results suggest that future work on multiracial identification must pay closer attention to the varied histories of specific multiracial ancestry groups.

Read the entire article here.

University of Vermont study examines biracial identity

Burlington Free Press
2010-12-28

Tim Johnson, Free Press Staff Writer

Even though he was born of a white mother and an African father, Barack Obama is commonly referred to as the first black president. That’s a sign, sociologists say, that America’s “one-drop rule”—a vestige of the United States’ segregationist past—is still with us.

Under the one-drop rule, a person with even minimal African ancestry (one drop of black blood) was considered black. In the Jim Crow South, such people were denied the rights and opportunities accorded to—unless they had sufficiently light skin and Caucasian features to conceal their African ancestry and “pass” themselves off as white.

Racial “passing” still takes place today, University of Vermont sociologist Nikki Khanna reports in a new study, but in different ways. Light-skinned people with African ancestry might pass themselves off as white or as black, depending on the situation. And biracial people with one white parent and one black parent are more likely for various reasons to identify themselves as black and even to conceal their white ancestry, Khanna said…

A person’s racial identity is determined not just by society; it also can be self-defined. Even people who regard themselves as biracial often are inclined to pass themselves off as monoracial, Khanna reports in an article, co-written with Cathryn Johnson of Emory University, published recently in Social Psychology Quarterly…

..The fact that “biracial” and “multiracial” have entered common American parlance suggests that the “one-drop rule” might be weakening, Khanna said. The U.S. census, beginning in 2000, allowed respondents to choose more than one race.

Still, the widespread perception that people with one black parent are black has its roots in a historically racist attitude that “one drop of black blood made one black, but one drop of white blood did not make one white,” as Khanna and Johnson put it.

Khanna, daughter of an Indian father and a white mother, grew interested in interracial studies in graduate school. She said she noticed that research was lacking on the offspring of interracial couples…

Read the entire article here.

Les Enfants de la colonie: Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté / Children of The Colonies: The Métis of the French Empire: Citizens or Subjects?

Éditions La Découverte
2007
336 pages
Dimensions: 155 * 240 mm
ISBN: 9782707139825

Emmanuelle Saada, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies
Columbia University

The colonial encounter in the French Empire produced tens of thousands of ‘métis’ children. Most were the product of short-term relationships between European men and native women. Many were abandoned by their fathers, and condemned to illegitimacy. Colonial elites considered them a threat because they blurred the sharp distinction between citizens and subjects on which the colonial order rested. Colonial authorities met this challenge with an array of social and legal efforts to resolve this ambiguity—to «reclassify» the « métis problem » out of existence. Education and culture played a key role in this process, as métis children were placed in special orphanages devoted to « straightening out their heredity », turning them into French citizens of « soul and quality ». This book explores the forgotten history of these children of the colonies, and of their central place in larger strategies of imperial domination and the management of colonial sexuality. It pays special attention to Indochina, which served as a laboratory for the “métis question”, but it is also an account of a global Empire marked by the persistent challenge of maintaining boundaries between citizen and subject. In exploring this intersection between sexuality, race and citizenship in the colonial context, this book challenges and revises the ‘republican model’ of nationhood that has dominated histories of France since the 19th century.

Pendant la colonisation française, des dizaines de milliers d’enfants sont nés d’« Européens » et d’« indigènes ». Souvent illégitimes, non reconnus puis abandonnés par leur père, ces métis furent perçus comme un danger parce que leur existence brouillait la frontière entre « citoyens » et « sujets » au fondement de l’ordre colonial. Leur situation a pourtant varié : invisibles en Algérie, ils ont été au centre des préoccupations en Indochine. La « question métisse » a également été posée à Madagascar, en Afrique et en Nouvelle-Calédonie.

Retraçant l’histoire oubliée de ces enfants de la colonie, cet ouvrage révèle une face cachée, mais fondamentale, de l’histoire de l’appartenance nationale en France : il montre comment les tentatives d’assimilation des métis ont culminé, à la fin des années 1920, avec des décrets reconnaissant la citoyenneté à ceux qui pouvaient prouver leur « race française ». Aux colonies, la nation se découvrait sous les traits d’une race.

Cette législation bouleversa le destin de milliers d’individus, passant soudainement de la sujétion à la citoyenneté : ainsi, en Indochine, en 1954, 4 500 enfants furent séparés de leur mère et « rapatriés » en tant que Français. Surtout, elle introduisait la race en droit français, comme critère d’appartenance à la nation. Cela oblige à revoir le « modèle républicain » de la citoyenneté, fondé sur la figure d’un individu abstrait, adhérant volontaire à un projet politique commun et à souligner les liens entre filiation, nationalité et race.

Table of Contents

• Préface, par Gérard Noiriel
• Introduction
• I / Le métissage : une question sociale coloniale
• 1. Une question impériale – Nouvel empire, nouvelle question – Hybrides et bâtards – Géographie de la question métisse – Un problème impérial – Les chiffres du métissage
• 2. Menace pour l’ordre colonial – Légionnaires, filles de peu et parias – Déracinés et déclassés – Le spectacle du désordre – Dignité et prestige en situation coloniale
• 3. « Reclasser » les métis – Produire des métis en leur portant secours ? – De la nécessité d’intervenir – Vers une prise en charge par l’État colonial – Notables vs. prolétaires de la colonisation – Dépister, signaler et secourir – Passer les frontières – Vers une demande de droit
• II / La question métisse saisie par le droit
• 4. Nationalité et citoyenneté en situation coloniale – Les enjeux d’une condition juridique – Les juristes et l’indigène – La citoyenneté française en pratique – Les métis entre sujétion et citoyenneté
• 5. La controverse des « reconnaissances frauduleuses » – Les « reconnaissances frauduleuses », « fraudes » à la citoyenneté – Destin d’une controverse juridique – La production d’un droit impérial – Paternité, citoyenneté et ordre politique
• 6. La recherche de paternité aux colonies – La recherche de paternité en métropole : un texte de compromis – Un débat colonial – Paternité et citoyenneté : nature et volonté – Paternité et race
• 7. Citoyens en vertu de la race – Le droit hors de lui – La « question métisse » saisie par le droit – Le retournement de la jurisprudence – La fabrique du droit colonial – Vérité sociologique/vérité biologique, « droit reflet »/« droit instituant » – Mise en œuvre d’un droit racial
• III / La force du droit
• 8. Le passage du droit : les effets de la citoyenneté sur la catégorie de « métis » – La racialisation des pratiques administratives – Renforcement de la prise en charge des métis – Les métis, des cadres de la colonisation – Une question postcoloniale
• 9. Des identités saisies par le droit – Des Français des colonies – Vers un multiculturalisme impérial ? – Catégorie juridique et sentiment d’identité
• 10. Le statut des métis, miroir de la nationalité et de la citoyenneté françaises ? – La race dans la loi – Métis coloniaux et métis juifs – La question métisse et les « modèles républicains » de la nationalité et de la citoyenneté
• Conclusion – Sources – Bibliographie.

Recent Studies on Biracial Identity and Hypodescent to be Discussed on Mixed Chicks Chat (Pre-recorded)

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #186 – Discussion on Recent Studies on Biracial Identity and Hypodescent
When: Tuesday, 2010-12-28, 22:00Z (17:00 EDT, 16:00 CDT, 14:00 PDT)

In this pre-recorded episode recent studies by Harvard Ph.D. student, Arnold K. Ho (“Evidence for hypodescent and racial hierarchy in the categorization and perception of biracial individuals”) and University of Vermont Assistant Professor Nikki Khanna (“Passing as Black: Racial Identity Work among Biracial Americans”) will be discussed.

Listen to the episode here.  Download the episode here.

Interpreting the Census: The Elasticity of Whiteness and the Depoliticization of Race 

2007
pages 155-170 

Katya Gibel Mevorach, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Grinnell College 

From the anthology: 

Racial Liberalism and the Politics of Urban America
Michigan State University Press
2007
280 pages
6 ” x 9 ”
ISBN: 0-87013-669-0, 978-0-87013-669-6 

Edited by: 

Curtis Stokes, Professor of Political Philosophy and African American Thought
James Madison College of Public Affairs
Michigan State University 

Theresa A. Melendez, Associate Professor of Chicano/Chicana Literature
Michigan State University 

I begin with a brief review of how whiteness was established as a norm and context for considering initial media reports of U.S. Census data on race released in March 2001.  This is followed by reflections on the politically conservative ramifications of multiracialism and multiculturalism, which have had an exaggerated impact on popular interpretations of the census.  As a preface, it should be noted that although we are, collectively, caught in the trap of using race as a noun, race should be understood as a verb—a predicate that requires action.  People do not belong to a race but the are raced; in this context, race operates as a social fact with concrete material consequences for the manner in which experiences shape individual lives and their meaning. 

Let us take note of an overlooked but rather obvious observation: inequality is not distributed equally.  Therefore Americans of all colors and national origins need a constant reminder that Africans brought to the English colonies in the 1600s were strategically and explicitly excluded, by law and social custom, from the privileges and rights accorded English men.  This is a critical factor in how U.S. history has been shaped.  Emphasizing the unequal distribution of inequality underlines the continuities and clarifies the linkages between the past and the present.  Beginning in the colonial period, being white was perceived and defined as having certain privileges and rights, including right to citizenship,  to vote, to serve in the militia and bear arms, and to be a member of a jury.  Most important of all was the right of self-possession—in other words, he right to be identified as a free person and to act on that right.  Children of enslaved African females were legally designated as slaves and property of their masters, who often where their biological fathers.  As blackness quickly came to be associated with slave status, the law set the parameters within which, conceptually, people with African ancestors would be legally and socially identified as Negroes (Fields 1990)… 

…In sum, the multiracial movement has successfully blurred the lines between two very different forms of identifying: public self-identification and personal or private plural identities. From Elk magazine to Seventeen and ABC to MTV, the notion of mixed-race and multiracial identities is given positive visibility as a celebration of how much America is changing. Curiously, this multimedia arena has neglected a discussion of the limitations of a notion of multiracialism that refers only to children whose parents are raced differently. In fact, the campaign for a multiracial category completely obscures the fact that black or African American is already a multiracial category. Patricia Williams skillfully interprets this phenomenon when she writes, “what troubles me is the degree to which few people in the world, and most particularly in the United States, are anything but multiracial, to say nothing of biracial. The use of the term seems to privilege the offspring of mixed marriages as those ‘between’ races without doing much to enhance the social status of us mixed-up products of the illegitimacies of the not so distanct past” (1997, 53)…

Read the entire chapter here.

The genealogical imagination: the inheritance of interracial identities

The Sociological Review
Volume 53, Issue 3 (August 2005)
pages 476–494
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.2005.00562.x

Katharine Tyler, Lecturer in Race and Ethnicity
Department of Sociology
University of Surrey

The aim of this article is to examine ethnographically how ideas of descent, biology and culture mediate ideas about the inheritance of racial identities. To do this, the article draws upon interviews with the members of interracial families from Leicester, a city situated in the East Midlands region of England. The article focuses upon the genealogical narratives of the female members of interracial families who live in an ethnically diverse inner-city area of Leicester. Attention is paid to the ways in which the women mobilise and intersect ideas about kinship, ancestry, descent, belonging, place, biology and culture when they think about the inheritance of their own and/or their children’s interracial identities. The article’s emphasis upon the constitution of interracial identities contributes to the sociological study of race and genealogy by exploring the racialised fragmentation of ideas of inheritance and descent across racial categories and generations.

Read or purchase the article here.

The New Nadir: The Political Economy of the Contemporary Black Racial Formation

The Black Scholar
2010-03-22

Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Associate Professor of History and African American Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

IN “THE NEW NADIR: The Political Economy of the Contemporary Black Racial Formation,” using the Marxist method of historical materialism analyze the period after Turner’s investigation, that is, from the early 1990s to the present. Like Turner and Mendenhall, attend to history, economy, politics, and ideology. I explore how the transformation to financialized global racial capitalism has structured the lives of contemporary African Americans. My main thesis is that the transformation to a new capitalist accumulation structure has reversed or mitigated most of the socioeconomic, but not the political gains achieved by the civil rights and Black Power movements. In the context of the pivotal events in the transformation of the U.S. and world political economies, I highlight four seminal events in the construction of the New Nadir. They are: (1) the suppression of black voters in Florida in the 2000 presidential election; (2) the racialized social catastrophe caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005; (3) the devastating loss of African American wealth due to the subprime foreclosure crisis in 2007; and (4) the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first African American president in 2008. These events illustrate the contradictory nature of the contemporary black racial formation. Dividing the effects on African America into their primary economic and political impacts, I explore ten major transformations that financialized global racial capitalism has wrought on African America. Like Mendenhall and Turner, I suggest that the way forward from this moment of devastation, rollback, and retreat lies through a (re)engagement with Marxism. Until capitalism can be destroyed, what is needed are fully developed black Marxist critiques of “the paradox of the contemporary conjuncture” and the construction of radical strategies for black liberation and social transformation in the age of financialized global racial capitalism.

ON MAY 9, 1865, Frederick Douglass addressed the last meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In an atmosphere bursting with excitement and pride of accomplishment, Douglass offered a cautionary note. He speculated that emancipation would witness the metamorphosis, rather than the end of “Slavery.” According to Douglass:

“Slavery has been fruitful in giving itself names. It has been called ‘the peculiar institution,’ ‘the social system,’ and the ‘impediment.’ It has been called by a great many names, and it will call itself by yet another name; and you and I and all of us had better wait and see what new form this old monster will assume, in what new skin this old snake will come forth next.”

Douglass knew slavery was merely one form through which a more fundamental and durable phenomenon manifested itself. Though he did not name it, Douglass was conceptualizing black racial oppression, the systematic, pervasive, and persistent domination of people of African descent in the United States of America. (1)

Black racial oppression has undergone three transformations since Douglass observed its chameleon-like capacity to transform itself. (2) The contemporary black racial formation, the New Nadir is a consequence of the transformation to financialized global racial capitalism, a new stage of capitalist accumulation which is characterized by three interconnected processes: globalization of production and markets; neoliberal(ism) social policies; and financialization, the shift of investment from production to monetary “products.” (3)…

…The repudiation of “blackness” or African American identity is another significant aspect of the political fragmentation occurring within African America. The ideological assault “blackness” is rooted in colorblind racial ideology and its desire to promote a post-black identity or allegedly to move beyond race. The push to transcend racial identity is a joint project of two overlapping sets of political actors, neoconservatives and the bi- or multiracial identity movement. This collective enterprise has alternatively challenged the use of racial categories in public policy, research, college admissions, and in employment. Yet they have also labored to expand the racial categories on the census and throughout U.S. society, further undermining racial political solidarity. The mixed-race identity movement casts African American identity as an atavistic essentialism, a fiction based totally on the notion of hypodescent or the “one drop rule.” Mixed-race philosopher Naomi Zack and other leaders of the multiracial movement suggest that African Americans have colluded with Euro-Americans to suppress “mixed-race” persons’ right to “self-identification” and “selfhood,” by denying them the right to embrace the fullness of their parental background or “racial” heritage. Rather than constitute a move to destroy racial categories, the creation of a bi- and multiracial classification represents an attempt to construct a new “racial” group. To shift the U.S. biracial classificatory schema and racial order to a multiracial system would locate light-skinned persons of mixed race in a space above African Americans, and perhaps Latinos/as, Asian Americans, but definitely below whites. It would represent what sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has called “the Latin Americanization of racial classification in the USA.” (39)

GIVEN ITS ASPIRATIONS, it is ironic that the multiracial identity movement is a consequence of the Civil Rights movement, specifically three of its partial successes, Loving v. Virginia (1967), Affirmative Action, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act and its 1988 enhancements. The Loving decision abolished miscegenation law. Affirmative Action provided a generation of African Americans greater access to education and to newly created positions in the expanding technical-managerial sectors of the U.S. political economy or business set-asides for their entrepreneurial ventures. The 1968 Fair Housing Act provided a mechanism for exacerbating the class-based spatial division within African America. It also owes much to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which eliminated the nationality quotas that were legislated by the 1924 Immigration Act.

According to historian Minkah Makalani: (40)

“Following 1967, when anti-miscegenation laws were declared unconstitutional, more than one million persons were born of mixed parentage in the United States. In the 1990s alone, these births (more than 300,000) were 1.4 percent of total U.S. births, 8.9 percent of all births with at least one black parent, and 43 percent of all births with parents from two different racial groups. On the 2000 U.S. census, only 784,764 persons (0.6 percent of the U.S. population) marked black and white as their racial designation.”

In 2000, the census identified only 784,764 individuals as having one black parent and one non-black parent. Additionally, bi- or multiracial-identified individuals constituted only about 2.1 percent of the 36.4 million African American people. This meager figure is not surprising, since exogamy among blacks is extremely low—6 percent for men and 2 percent for women. Nor is it surprising that 43 percent of such individuals are the product of a relationship between a black and a white person. Asians and Latinos/as, regardless of nationality, rarely marry or have children with African Americans or other blacks in the United States. Sociologist Steven Steinberg discovered that 40 percent of the children of Asian immigrants and a third of U.S. born Latinos/as between ages twenty-five and thirty-four marry non-Latino whites. In truth, the African American and black communities in the U.S. remain shockingly inassimilable. Generally, only other blacks find African Americans, West Indians, and Africans worth marrying. Given the smallness of their numbers, why has the contemporary mixed-race phenomenon received so much scholarly and popular attention? (41)

THE MIXED-RACE issue among African Americans derives its significance from its class and ideological implications for the new black racial formation, not its size. The fact is that a disproportionate number of those adopting this designation or having it thrust upon them are middle-class. Like Africans and Caribbean blacks, individuals identified as mixed-race seem to be supplanting those designated as African American in high profile economic, social, and political positions. This is especially so with student admissions at the nation’s elite universities and increasingly so among the professoriate and the intelligentsia. In many ways, it represents a return to a pre-Black Power intraracial class hierarchy. Given the material conditions of black racial oppression and the contemporary racial ideology of colorblindness, this move would result in further solidifying the historic relationship between light skin color and class in the African American community. Correspondingly, it would further fracture its already frayed class relations. Several scholars have documented the legacy of the color-class connection in African American history. Richard Seltzer and Robert Smith, for instance, have demonstrated that, “the black community continues to exhibit a degree of class stratification based on color, with lighter-skin blacks exhibiting higher education and occupational attainments.” A successful multiracial identity project would make it easier for a comparably wealthy sector of African American society to adopt conservative political positions supporting their privileged economic status, rather than policies more closely linked to that of the black majority…

Read the entire article here.

Making Multiracials: State, Family, And Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line [Book Review]

The Black Scholar
2010-03-22

Alexes Harris, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Washington

Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line, by Kimberly McClain DaCosta (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007; $30.95, paper, 280 pp; ISBN 10 0-80475546-9).

THIS THOUGHT-PROVOKING book addresses several interesting and important questions about the relatively recent emergence of a multiracial movement in the United States. In Making Multiracials, DaCosta explores a unique racial and ethnic project in the making and asks how and why has a group of people who have been largely invisible to and isolated from one another mobilized for a new census classification? Using a purposively drawn sample of 62 individuals including those who have mixed-race ancestry and those who are in mixed-race relationships, and ethnographic observations of group activities and events around multiracial identity, DaCosta finds that mixed-race individuals become members of multiracial organizations for a sense of belonging, a safe space, and to reflect on their shared experiences…

Read the entire review here.

How Multi-Ethnic People Identify Themselves

Talk of The Nation
National Public Radio
2010-12-20
00:30:17

Neal Conan, Host

Guests

Nikki Khanna, Assistant Professor of Sociology (and lead author, “Passing As Black: Racial Identity Work Among Biracial Americans”)
University of Vermont

Casey Gane-McCalla, Lead Blogger
NewsOne

Kip Fulbeck, Professor of Art (and author of Mixed: Portraits Of Multiracial Kids)
University of California, Santa Barbara

A new study shows that most people who are biracial self-identify as “biracial.” But in many instances, multi-ethnic Americans change the way they self-identify depending on who they’re talking with. The study was published in the December 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I’m Neal Conan, in Washington.

What are you? People of mixed race hear that question throughout their lives. The question comes in parts: half-black, half-white, part Asian, a quarter Native American. Sometimes the answer may vary depending on the situation. Sometimes it may change for good.

During the era of Jim Crow segregation, a percentage of those with lighter skin chose to pass as white. Now, it looks as if that’s reversed. In a study published earlier this month, in Social Psychology Quarterly, sociologists found that among black-white biracial adults, more and more self-identify as black…

…Ms. NIKKI KHANNA (Lead Author, “Passing As Black: Racial Identity Work Among Biracial Americans”): Hi, Neal, thank you so much.

CONAN: And I think one of the things we should make clear is your study finds most people who are biracial identify as biracial.

Ms. KHANNA: Absolutely, absolutely. So this study looks at black-white biracial Americans and how they racially identify themselves, and that was the first thing we found, that most identify themselves to others as biracial or multiracial or mixed-race. These terms are certainly becoming much more common today. But in some situations, they identify themselves mono-racially, as black of white.

CONAN: In some situations. For example?

Ms. KHANNA: So for example, so we found individuals would present themselves as black or white. As white, you know, not uncommon were people presenting themselves as white in the workplace, for example, to, you know, they perceived it was advantageous for them to do so to move up in the workplace and move ahead, climb that ladder.

So we see some of that still happening today, although less so than individuals who are presenting themselves as black. And there were a number of situations where that seemed to come in handy. So, for example, during adolescence to fit in with black peers, you know, in adolescence, we all want to fit in.

So it’s not surprising. So in these situations, they oftentimes conceal their white ancestry, the fact that they had a white parent, to present themselves as black.

In other situations, they presented themselves as black when they found whiteness to be somehow stigmatized and negatively stereotyped, and they didn’t want to be associated with it. So they might have perceived whiteness as somehow bad.

Or one individual talked about perceiving whites as oppressive or the oppressor and not wanting to have basically anything to do with that. So in those situations, they would present themselves exclusively as black.

And in the last situation, respondents presented themselves as black oftentimes in filling out race questions commonly found on applications. So they would check the black box basically when they found it beneficial to do so. And this most often occurred on financial aid forms or college university application forms, scholarship application forms.

CONAN: Was there any inclination as to – or any finding that the more biracial people they knew, the more they might just stay with biracial?

Ms. KHANNA: Yeah, I mean, it’s very interesting. For many people that I interviewed in this study that they didn’t know other people who were biracial. So while, you know, it’s becoming increasingly common that there are more and more biracial Americans, oftentimes they didn’t even know other biracial people other than their siblings or another family member…

…CONAN: Joining us now is Casey Gane-McCalla. He’s the lead blogger for NewsOne.com, and he joins us from NPR’s bureau in New York. Nice to have you on the program with us today.

Mr. CASEY GANE-McCALLA (Assistant Editor, NewsOne): Yeah, thanks a lot, Neal.

CONAN: And you are half-black and half-white. How do you identify yourself?

Mr. GANE-McCALLA: I identify myself as both black and biracial. Obviously, I’m biracial, which is two races, but biracial is a very large term. You can be biracial and Mexican and Chinese. You could be biracial, and you could be Indian an Aborigine.

So biracial is a kind of broad term, and I believe that throughout history, black has kind of encompassed biracial. Like, biracial has had a little spot in the Venn Diagram of blackness. If you look from slavery to Jim Crow, if you were mixed, you were a slave. You might have been able to work in the house, but you were still a slave.

Or if it was during Jim Crow, and you tried to – there was no mixed water fountain. There was the two because – due to mostly because of social constructs, I identify as black, and I feel I’m part of the black struggle. I work for a black news website.

But I’m also – I’m definitely not ashamed of my mother’s family, and my mother fought against apartheid in South Africa. And again like the previous caller said, like, I knew a lot of my family, my father’s family from Jamaica, but all my mother’s family is in South Africa. So I didn’t know them that much.

CONAN: Just to clarify again on Nikki Khanna’s study, I think it was you were just studying black-white biracial.

Ms. KHANNA: Absolutely, yes, black-white biracial Americans…

…And let’s see if we can get another caller on the line. Let’s go to Shirley, Shirley with us from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

SHIRLEY (Caller): Yeah, I’m 71 years old and born of a white mother and black father. And this is something really, really puzzling to me because in my neighborhood, which was black, there were five white, mixed families, I’ll say that, and nobody even thought about it.

We didn’t realize, in my neighborhood, St. Louis, Missouri, that there was this type of thing. We knew plenty of people that were passing because they wanted good jobs. They wanted to go to the movies. But my mother just always went where she wanted to go. My sisters did, too, because they looked white.

But to me, this is just a new thing. This is not something that’s new. This is something that’s new that’s being studied.

CONAN: Well, new that people self-identify as biracial. I think when you were growing up…

SHIRLEY: Right.

CONAN: …as Casey Gane-McCalla pointed out, there was no choice. If you…

SHIRLEY: Well, you would just – I just lived in a black neighborhood. But you had a choice if you wanted to be called biracial because in most states except three, I think, if you have any white blood in you, you can claim white and only three states where you have to say you’re black.

But I’m just – you know, I’m just astonished by all this, that people are so amazed at this because I’m 71 years old, and this is old to me. I mean, this has been around so long…

…CONAN: You mentioned earlier, obviously this affects more than black and white. Joining us now is Kip Fulbeck, professor of art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with us from member station KCLU in Thousand Oaks. And nice to have you with us today.

Professor KIP FULBECK (Art, University of California, Santa Barbara; Author, “Mixed: Portraits Of Multiracial Kids”): Thank you, Neal.

CONAN: You’re also of mixed ethnicity, one parent Asian, the other white, and you call yourself hapa?

Mr. FULBECK: I do. Hapa is a Hawaiian word for half, and it refers to people who, like myself, are part Asian Pacific Islander and something else.

CONAN: So that is, in its own way, saying biracial?

Mr. FULBECK: Exactly.

CONAN: You’ve embraced this third racial category exclusive to people of white – Asian and white parents. Why? Why not just say biracial?

Mr. FULBECK: Well, Neal, the whole thing about being biracial, it’s such a huge, giant nebula because race, if we really want to talk openly, everyone listening to the show right now is African. It doesn’t even exist, biologically, in terms of DNA. We’re all African…

…CONAN: Here’s – we’re talking about biracial identity and self-identity. You’re listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

I should just reintroduce our guests. Casey Gane-McCalla, you just heard, a lead blogger at newsone.com. And also with us, Kip Fulbeck, a professor of art at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

This email from Darrel(ph) in Portland. I’m a 30-year-old black male with a white mother. I have never felt comfortable with the term biracial. Race is a social construct, one which often exposes ideological bias. I often have my blackness called into question, being treated by white people as being more acceptable than typical black people. It disgusts me when people assume my speaking pattern or intelligence are the result of my having a white parent rather than coming from an educated family or growing up on a university campus, especially considering the first thing people would use to describe me if I, say, stole their car would be my race.

I’m proud of my Scottish, Irish and German heritage just as I am of my West African heritage. However, my social experience in this country is that of a black man…

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Erasure of Euro-Asian: Recovering Early Radicalism and Feminism in South Asia

Women Unlimited
2009
312 pages
8.6 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
ISBN-10: 8188965405; ISBN-13: 978-8188965403

Kumari Jayawardena, Emeritus Associate Professor
University of Colombo

This book, focuses on the interaction between Asia and Europe in the wake of Portuguese, Dutch, French and British imperialism. It emphasises the vanguard role of the Euro-Asian communities in South Asia, the Burghers, Anglo-Indians and Eurasians, in struggles for democratic rights, long before colonial conditions were ripe for radical social and political change. With their utopian vision of a future democratic society, they agitated for widespread reforms such as worker and peasant rights, early radicalism, proto-nationalism, secularism and gender equality. Jayawardena brings the path-breaking efforts of these Euro-Asian pioneers from the footnotes of history into the main text, asks why their contributions have been ‘hidden from history’ and suggests that the obsession with ‘purity’ of race, both in South Asia and Europe, led to erasing the importance of this radical intelligentsia of mixed origin.