Mixed Race Studies

“There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama”: The Policy and Politics of American Multiracialism

Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
Harvard University
February 2010
Working Paper
68 pages

Jennifer Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Vesla Weaver, Assistant Professor
The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
University of Virginia

Forthcoming publication in Perspectives on Politics, June 2010.

For the first time in American history, the United States’ 2000 census allowed individuals to choose more than one race. That new policy sets up our exploration of whether and how multiracialism is entering Americans’ understanding and practice of race. By analyzing briefly earlier cases of racial construction, we uncover three factors important to understanding if and how intensely a feedback effect for racial classification will be generated. Using this framework, we find that multiracialism has been institutionalized in the federal government, and is moving toward institutionalization in the private sector and other governmental units. In addition, the small proportion of Americans who now define themselves as multiracial is growing absolutely and relatively, and evidence suggests a continued rise. Increasing multiracial identification is made more likely by racial mixture’s growing prominence in American society – demographically, culturally, economically, and psychologically. However, the politics side of the feedback loop is complicated by the fact that identification is not identity. Traditional racial or ethnic loyalties and understandings remain strong, including among potential multiracial identifiers. Therefore, if mixed race identification is to evolve into a multiracial identity, it may not be at the expense of existing group consciousness. Instead, we expect mixed race identity to be contextual, fluid, and additive, so that it can be layered onto rather than substituted for traditional monoracial commitments. If the multiracial movement successfully challenges the longstanding understanding and practice of “one drop of blood” racial groups, it has the potential to change much of the politics and policy of American race relations.

O’Leary, O’Riley, O’Hare, and O’Hara
There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama.
His mam’s daddy’s grandaddy was one Fulmuth Kearney
He’s as Irish as any from the lakes of Killarney
His mam’s from a long line of great Irish mamas;
There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama.

–“There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama“, Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys (Corrigan Brothers)

Read the entire paper here.

Multiracial no longer boxed in by the Census

USA Today
2010-03-02

Haya El Nasser

Jennifer Harvey was raised by her white mother and white stepfather in what she calls “a Caucasian world.” Harvey never met her father but she knew he was black and Cuban. That made her Hispanic, white and black.

“Blacks think I’m black,” she says. “Hispanics think I’m Hispanic. Honestly, I don’t identify with either bucket wholeheartedly — Caucasian, black or Hispanic.”…

…When Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president in 2008, some academics and political analysts suggested the watershed event could represent the dawning of a post-racial era in a land that has struggled over race relations for four centuries.

At the same time, growing ethnic and racial diversity fueled by record immigration and rates of interracial marriages have made the USA’s demographics far more complex. By 2050, there will be no racial or ethnic majority as the share of non-Hispanic whites slips below 50%, according to Census projections.

“It’s showing that tomorrow’s children and their children will in fact be multiracial, leading to a potential post-racial society,” says William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution.

“The issue isn’t just multirace,” says Census historian Margo Anderson, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “It’s the blurring of the very traditional black vs. white. Categories that held until about 1980 are shifting in large numbers. … The clarity is breaking down.”…

…Why does the government ask about race and ethnicity?

Federal agencies need the information to monitor compliance with anti-discrimination laws such as the Voting Right Act and the Civil Rights Act, fair employment practices and affirmative action mandates…

…”For some, the multirace response option represented an opportunity to acknowledge both parents,” says Roderick Harrison, a demographer at Howard University and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. “But for a lot of others, it’s like, ‘OK, are you going to turn your back on the rest of us?’ … A lot of the racial and ethnic politics of the Census are that we want the biggest numbers possible for our groups.”..

Read the entire article here.
View the photo gallery from the article here.

Reimagining The ‘Tragic Mulatto’ [Interview with Author Heidi W. Durrow]

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2010-03-02

Michele Norris, Host
All Things Considered

Like so many children of mixed marriages, the author Heidi Durrow has often felt like she’s had to straddle two worlds.

She is the daughter of a black serviceman and a white Danish mother.

Her own personal search for identity inspired her debut novel, The Girl Who Fell From The Sky. The story revolves around a girl who moves across the country to live with her grandmother after surviving a family tragedy.

The book has received breathless critical acclaim, and it was awarded the Bellwether Prize for fiction that addresses issues of social justice…

Read the entire story and an excerpt from the book here.  Listen to the interview here.

Lewis Explores Race During Unity Month

The Emory Wheel
Volume 91, Number 22
2009-11-13
page 3

Pooja Dhruv, Staff Writer

Elliott Lewis, former television news reporter and author of Fade: My Journeys in Multiracial America, discussed current American racial issues during his keynote address for Unity Month on Wednesday.

According to College sophomores Yan Chen and Melissa Mair, who both helped head the event, Lewis was chosen to speak because of his research on race and the growing multiracial identity in America.

…“For example, even though both my parents were half black and half white, they only identified as being black; but I identify as being both,” he said…

…Lewis said most multiracial people go through a period in their lives when they question how to racially or ethnically identify themselves.

“That period of doubt might last 10 minutes or 10 hours, but all multiracial people go through it; I now identify as biracial, half white and half black but, I also went through that period of doubt,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

The Race Against Race [Book review of “What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America”]

The New Republic
2010-01-29

Richard Posner

“What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America” by Peggy Pascoe
“Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell” by Paul A. Lombardo

Peggy Pascoe, a historian, has written what might seem to be an uncannily timely history of laws against miscegenation—interracial marriage or procreation—in the United States. In 2008, after all, the nation elected its first president who had parents of different races. A nice coincidence for Pascoe, but not much more. Presidential candidates with an unusual background are elected only when their background has ceased to be problematic: the first Catholic when people stopped worrying that a Catholic president would be the Pope’s puppet; the first divorced person when divorce had become too common to be stigmatized; and now the first person of mixed race, when “miscegenation” has ceased to have any public significance and indeed has vanished from most people’s vocabulary. Black-white marriages remain rare, and many parents of whites do not want their children to marry blacks, and vice versa—but such aversions raise only personal issues, not social or political ones. So Pascoe’s book will tell us nothing about Obama’s presidency, but it is a good book that recounts a fascinating history and bears at least obliquely on one contemporary political issue—that of gay marriage.

Laws against mixed marriage have been surprisingly rare outside the United States. Nazi Germany forbade marriage between a German and any member of a non-Aryan “race,” thus including Jews, along with blacks, Slavs, and members of a host of other racial and nonracial groups. And South Africa in the apartheid era forbade interracial marriage. Because the regulation of marriage was considered a state rather than a federal prerogative, there was never a nationwide ban on mixed marriage in the United States.

The American laws forbidding black-white marriage date to colonial times. They were found in northern as well as southern colonies and states. But they had little significance in the North because there were not many blacks, as there were in the South, where the laws reflected and ratified the inferior status of blacks. Not all Southern blacks were slaves, but not even free blacks had the rights of citizens. Oddly, in light of the later eugenic concern with interracial procreation, the taboo against interracial marriage coexisted with a high rate of procreative sexual intercourse between white men and black women (condoned by the authorities despite laws against non-marital sex), combined with a fierce determination to prevent sex between black men and white women. This odd pattern made a certain economic sense. It increased the range of sexual opportunities for white men, and since the child of a black slave woman was a slave, the children of such relationships were not an economic burden. White men retained a monopoly of white women, while black men had to share black women with white men. White men dominated government, so it is not surprising that the laws were formulated and enforced in such a way as to maximize their sexual freedom, although they could not marry black women…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-race Americans face wage discrimination

New Scientist
Magazine issue 2696
Science in Society
2009-02-22

Luckily for Barack Obama, the US president’s salary doesn’t depend on who gets elected. A study of racial discrimination in the US workplace suggests that mixed-race Americans  are discriminated against just as much as black people in terms of salary.

Economist Robert Fairlie at the University of California at Santa Cruz examined the US census for 2000 – the first to include the “mixed race” option for ethnicity. The census also questioned people about their earnings…

Read the entire article here.

Deterritorialised Blackness: (Re)making coloured identities in South Africa

postamble
Volume 2, Number 1
2006

Janette Yarwood, Doctoral Candidate
Department of Anthropology
City University of New York

“When I was a kid in the early eighties, this music [hip-hop] was the first I’d heard that I could relate to. You know, ‘Fuck da Police’, and all that shit, that’s what I was feeling.”
Shamel X interview

“Black is not a question of pigmentation. The Black I’m talking about is a historical category, a political category, a cultural category…  Black was created as a political category in a certain historical moment.”2

During the summer of 2003 I took my first pre-dissertation trip to South Africa to develop my dissertation topic on coloured identities in post-apartheid South Africa. Although it is no secret that hip-hop as both a musical genre and a defined lifestyle has gained recognition and popularity around the globe, I was not quite prepared for what I experienced in South Africa. I encountered cars blasting Jay-Z, Sean Paul and P. Diddy among others; people wearing Sean John, Avirex or United States sports team jerseys; and cell phones ringing to the tunes of the latest 50 Cent or R. Kelly songs. I found that as a black person of Caribbean and American descent, I felt a common blackness with the coloured people I interacted with not because of a common African heritage but mainly because of black popular culture and hip-hop culture specifically. This led me to ask: What does it mean to be black in today’s world? Is there a transnational or globalised notion of blackness?…

Read the entire article here.

Dominic Mhiripiri ’12: Please. Mr. Obama is not black

The Brown Daily Herald
2010-02-03

Dominic Mhiripiri, Opinions Columnist

Recently, the United States marked the first anniversary of Barack Obama’s historic ascent to the apex of American politics. For a candidate who electrified a whole generation of American youth and whose promise gave the whole world great expectations, the man’s image borders on the divine. At least, it did one year ago. Since then, America has basked in some sort of self-congratulatory-slash-too-good-to-be-true euphoria. It’s because Obama’s election comes in a different context — namely, a very historic one. It’s because he is the first black president of the United States.

Wait. Really? Black?…

…In an understandable but nevertheless misplaced assertion, the U.S. is trying to convince itself, primarily through Obama’s election, that it has attained the cherished ideal that Martin Luther King Jr. and many others fought for in their illustrious civil rights movement: a post-racial America…

Read the entire article here.

Sociology Noir: Studies at the University of Chicago in Loneliness, Marginality and Deviance, 1915–1935

McFarland Publishers
2007
196 pages
7 photos, bibliography, index
softcover ISBN: 978-0-7864-2990-5

Roger A. Salerno, Professor of Sociology
Pace University, New York

Between 1915 and 1935 the University of Chicago was the center for the production of innovative sociological research that unearthed the marginalized existence of unconventional Americans. Referred to as the Chicago school monographs by social historians, these works brought acclaim to the country’s premiere graduate program in sociology. Working at the shadowy margins of the city, these Chicago school scholars dramatically examined the lives of delinquents, prostitutes, gangsters, and homeless men. Their work harmonized with narratives of proletarian and pulp fiction and the serialized newspaper accounts of urban vice and deviance. This book offers a survey of some of these key monographs such as The Unadjusted Girl, The Hobo, The Jack-Roller and The Taxi Dance Hall.

“Remarkable” Mixed-Race Family in 20th Century Is Subject of Book Discussion [with Book Signing by the Author]

James Madison Building
Dining Room A, Sixth Floor, J
101 Independence Aveune, SE
Washington, DC
2010-03-03, 12:30 EST (Local Time)
Webcast Time: 00:59:24

Adele Logan Alexander, Professor of History
George Washington University

“Parallel Worlds” Focuses on “the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin”

When William Henry Hunt married Ida Alexander Gibbs in the spring of 1904, their wedding was a glittering Washington social event that joined an Oberlin-educated diplomat’s daughter and a Wall Street veteran who could trace his lineage to Jamestown. Their union took place in a world of refinement and privilege, but both William and Ida had mixed-race backgrounds, and their country therefore placed severe restrictions on their lives because, at that time, “one drop of colored blood” classified anyone as a Negro…

…Adele Logan Alexander has written a fascinating account of this couple in “Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin” (University of Virginia Press, 2010). Alexander will discuss and sign her book on Wednesday, March 3, at 12:30 p.m. in Dining Room A, sixth floor, James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E. The event, part of the Books and Beyond author series of the Center for the Book, is free and open to the public; no tickets are required…

..The Center for the Book was established by Congress in 1977 “to use the resources and prestige of the Library of Congress to promote books, reading, literacy and libraries.” With its many educational programs that reach readers of all ages, through its support of the National Book Festival and through its dynamic state centers in the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Center for the Book has developed a nationwide network of organizational partners dedicated to promoting the wonders and benefits of reading. The Center also oversees the new Read.gov website, with its exclusive “Exquisite Corpse Adventure” serialized story.

View the entire webcast here.

Listen to National Public Radio‘s Michel Martin interview Adele Logan Alexander about the book on Tell Me More (on  2010-02-10) here.