Mixed Race Studies

Critical Mixed Race Studies in the Twenty-First Century (ETHN 0090B S01)

Brown University
Fall 2013

Alexandrina R. Agloro, Visiting Instructor in American Studies

This course will guide students through an understanding of the historical, contemporary, and ideological rationale behind the constructions of mixed race, and how mixed race theory plays out in history, art, and contemporary media. This course aims to expand the conversations of mixed race beyond the stereotypes of tragic mulattos and happy hapas, instead interrogating what mixed race looks like in the twenty-first century and what historical precedents can explain current phenomena.

For more information, click here. View the syllabus (in Microsoft Word format) here.

The week of October 20th, my co-authored article with Glenn C. Robinson titled, “The Impact of Internet Publishing and Online Communications on Mixed-Race Discourses” from the Asian American Literary Review Special Issue on Mixed Race, will be part of the required reading. Please read the syllabus for information on some other additional excellent resources.

Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (Fourth Edition)

Rowman & Littlefield
July 2013
384 pages
6 1/4 x 9 1/2
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4422-2054-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4422-2055-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4422-2056-0

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s acclaimed Racism without Racists documents how beneath our contemporary conversation about race lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for—and ultimately justify—racial inequalities. This provocative book explodes the belief that America is now a color-blind society.

The fourth edition adds a chapter on what Bonilla-Silva calls “the new racism,” which provides the essential foundation to explore issues of race and ethnicity in more depth. This edition also updates Bonilla-Silva’s assessment of race in America after President Barack Obama’s re-election. Obama’s presidency, Bonilla-Silva argues, does not represent a sea change in race relations, but rather embodies disturbing racial trends of the past.

In this fourth edition, Racism without Racists will continue to challenge readers and stimulate discussion about the state of race in America today.

Features

• An engaging read that provokes classroom discussion
• Challenges the truth behind the assumption “I don’t see race”
• A new chapter on what Bonilla-Silva calls “new racism” in America introduces students to key themes in studying race and ethnicity
• Assesses the impact of Obama’s presidency and reelection on race relations in America

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the Fourth Edition
• 1. The Strange Enigma of Race in Contemporary America
• 2. The New Racism: The U.S. Racial Structure Since the 1960s
• 3. The Central Frames of Color-Blind Racism
• 4. The Style of Color Blindness: How to Talk Nasty about Minorities without Sounding Racist
• 5. “I Didn’t Get That Job Because of a Black Man”: Color-Blind Racism’s Racial Stories
• 6. Peeking Inside the (White) House of Color Blindness: The Significance of Whites’ Segregation
• 7. Are All Whites Refined Archie Bunkers? An Examination of White Racial Progressives
• 8. Are Blacks Color Blind, Too?
• 9. E Pluribus Unum, or the Same Old Perfume in a New Bottle? On the Future of Racial Stratification in the United States
• 10. Race Matters in Obamerica: The Sweet (but Deadly) Enchantment of Color Blindness in Black Face
• 11. “The (Color-Blind) Emperor Has No Clothes”: Exposing the Whiteness of Color Blindness
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author

The Uniqueness of Dante de Blasio

Gotham Gazette: The Place or New York Policy and Politics
New York, New York
2013-09-24

Andy Beveridge, Professor of Sociology
Queens College, City University of New York

As New York took in the extent of the win by Bill de Blasio in the Democratic primary for mayor, the impact of a powerful television ad starring his son Dante seemed plain.

The ad hit on de Blasio’s main campaign points of taxing the wealthy, ending a “stop-and-frisk era that unfairly targets people of color” and universal pre-K. But it was the messenger that made it a show-stopper: A mixed-race kid with an exuberant Afro speaking to the camera about how his dad was “the only Democrat with the guts to really break with the Bloomberg years.”

De Blasio’s wife is a black woman, and both Dante and Chiara (his daughter) are mixed race. With his family and the ad featuring his son playing key roles in his campaign, de Blasio split the black vote almost evenly with former comptroller Bill Thompson, the only black candidate for mayor.

Remember, in the primary between Hillary Clinton and Obama, who is mixed race, in 2008 Hillary Clinton did better among white and Hispanic voters than she did overall, and Barack Obama won the black vote by a very wide margin in an overall close race. In terms of who voted for whom, race mattered.

As Joe Lenski, the man behind the exit polls, said in the Daily News, “I don’t know if I could ever remember a race where a black guy is (close to) losing the black vote, the woman is losing the woman vote, the Jewish guy is losing the Jewish vote. It’s quite impressive …. De Blasio did a good job of saying, ‘I’m one of you even though I’m not personally one of you.’ He was able to say, ‘my wife is African-American, my kids are multiracial.”

How unique is Dante de Blasio, the 16-year-old superstar of the 2013 elections, who communicated this important message? Just how many New Yorkers are non-Hispanic males who would identify themselves as black and white? An analysis of 2010 Census data shows that very few young New Yorkers are black and white, and even fewer are non-Hispanic black and white. Furthermore, there are much lower proportions of such individuals in New York City in the country at large. These data are presented in the accompanying table, and some are summarized in the two charts below…

Read the entire article here.

Geneticists and the Biology of Race Crossing

Science Magazine
Volume 182, Number 4114 (1973-11-23)
pages 790-796
DOI: 10.1126/science.182.4114.790

William B. Provine, Andrew H. and James S. Tisch Distinguished University Professor
Cornell University

Geneticists changed their minds about the biological effects of race crossing

Geneticists in England and the United States clearly reversed their published remarks on the effects of race crossing between 1930 and 1950. The reversal occurred in two steps. First came the change in the 1930’s from a condemnation of wide race crosses to an agnostic view. The second change, from the agnostic view to the belief that wide race crosses were at worst biologically harmless, took place during and shortly after World War II.

The entire reversal occurred in the light of little new compelling data from studies of actual human race crosses. The lack of new data is unsurprising. Few geneticists wished to initiate experiments that took three human generations to complete. And controlled race crosses are hard to arrange, even with government grants. What might be more surprising was the willingness of geneticists to make such positive statements about race crossing when they had so little reliable genetic evidence.

I interviewed or wrote to ten prominent geneticists who worked on human genetics between 1930 and 1950. Not one believed that new evidence on race crossing was the primary reason why geneticists changed their minds about the effects of race crossing. One plausible explanation, that the rise of “population thinking” (44) caused geneticists to change their minds, does not fit the evidence. Castle was no more of a “population” thinker than East, yet they differed radically in their conclusions about race crossing. What, then, did cause geneticists to change their minds?

Most important was the revulsion of educated people in the United States and England to Nazi race doctrines and their use in justifying extermination of Jews. Few geneticists wanted to argue, as had the Nazis, that biology showed race crossing was harmful. Instead, having witnessed the horrible toll, geneticists naturally wanted to argue that biology showed race crossing was at worst harmless. No racist nation could misuse that conclusion. And geneticists did revise their biology to fit their feelings of revulsion.

Geneticists’ ideas about the related question of hereditary mental differences between races is perhaps undergoing a similar development to that seen earlier in their ideas about race crossing. In 1951, judging from the response to the Unesco second statement on race and comments in genetics literature, most geneticists agreed with Muller that races probably differed in significant average mental traits. By 1969, when Arthur Jensen advocated this view in his controversial article (45), most geneticists who spoke publicly on the issue had adopted an agnostic position. Knowledge of hereditary racial differences in IQ had scarcely changed since 1951, but society had changed considerably in racial attitudes. It will be interesting to see if during the next several decades geneticists will argue, on the basis of little additional evidence, that hereditary mental differences between races do not exist.

I am not condemning geneticists because social and political factors have influenced their scientific conclusions about race crossing and race differences. It is necessary and natural that changing social attitudes will influence areas of biology where little is known and the conclusions are possibly socially explosive. The real danger is not that biology changes with society, but that the public expects biology to provide the objective truth apart from social influences. Geneticists and the public should realize that the science of genetics is often closely intertwined with social attitudes and political considerations…

Read or purchase the article here.

Fitting Into the Right Box: Multiracial America on the Rise

Brown Political Review
2013-10-18

Meg Sullivan

As swimmer Michael Phelps knows, one of the highest priorities of food corporations is maintaining their squeaky clean mainstream appeal. This usually involves companies giving wide berth to any manner of controversy, but Cheerios ignored this policy four months ago. In June, the cereal company released a 30 second television commercial that featured a mixed race married couple. The only detail of the ad that deviated from standard cereal advertisement conventions was black man and white woman actors playing the parents in the all-American family.

Whether or not Cheerios predicted the commotion their commercial would cause, we don’t know. Regardless, the ad first met backlash–negative reactions drove YouTube to disable comments on the online video–but then an overwhelming show of support from Americans. The multiracial community applauded Cheerios for depicting a family on television that looked more like theirs.

Aside from generating good publicity for Cheerios, the advertisement has drawn attention to the growing number of mixed race marriages and multiracial children in the United States. In 2010, 8.4 percent of all marriages were between individuals of a different race or ethnicity…

Read the entire article here.

Who stole all the black women from Britain?

Black Girl Dancing at Lughnasa
2013-10-17

Emma Dabiri, Teaching Fellow
Africa Department, School of African and Oriental Studies, London
Visual Sociology Ph.D. Researcher, Goldsmiths University of London

…Here in the UK, the  visibility of black women in representations of mainstream Black British culture is such that you might be forgiven for thinking we are an endangered species. The near erasure of Black British women from this terrain which is in the main dominated by black men and white women, is rarely commented upon, despite its prominence.  What is actually going on here? Is this some manifestation of the quite frankly ridiculous Eldrige Cleaver quote above. Or is it something else?.

The (ahem) ‘urban’ (we know what they really mean) landscape that provides the basis of so much of Britain’s somewhat depressing representations of mainstream youth culture borrows heavily from black culture, yet sometimes seems entirely devoid of black women. The characters who populate this world are black men and white women. Access may be permitted to the occasional mixed-race girl but beyond this tokenism this is the white woman’s world!

From movies such as Kidulthood, to the presenters of the Kiss FM Takeaway show, who typify this phenomenon, the symbols of ‘Urban’ or Black British youth culture are routinely Black men and their white female partners…

Read the entire article here.

Rethinking race, racism, identity and ideology in Latin America

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36,  Issue 10, 2013 (Special Issue: Rethinking Race, Racism, Identity, and Ideology in Latin America)
pages 1485-1489
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.808357

Tanya Golash-Boza, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Merced

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

This special issue explores ideas of race and racial hierarchy in Latin America in the twenty-first century. By examining the intersection between racialization and processes of identity formation, political struggle, as well as intimate social and economic relations, these essays question how and to what extent traditional racial ideologies continue to hold true. In so doing, we consider the implications of such ideologies for anti-racism struggles. This collection of articles provides a unique insight into the everyday lived experiences of racism, how racial inequalities are reproduced, and the rise of ethnic-based social movements in Latin America. The qualitative nature of the projects allows the authors to advance our understanding of how racial ideologies operate on the ground level. The geographic diversity of the articles – focusing on Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Costa Rica and Cuba – enables a greater understanding of the distinct ways that racial ideologies play out across different settings.

Race and national ideologies in the Americas are inextricable. The ideas and practices of race were essential to the conquest and colonization of the Americas (Smedley 2007). As European colonizers and settlers shaped the western hemisphere into nations, distinct racial ideologies emerged alongside national ideologies. This special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies provides us with new insights into how race and national ideologies continue to shift in Latin America, in the context of a globalizing world.

During the nineteenth century, Latin American countries began to break away from their colonial past and form independent states. Intellectual and political elites across Latin America preoccupied themselves with building national unity (Knight 1990). In these nation-building projects, national leaders had to contend with European scholars who denounced their racial degeneracy due to extensive racial mixing (Stepan 1991). Latin Americans could not simply ignore European arguments about racial inferiority as these arguments were central to scientific and medical discourses. Thus, they chose to counter European intellectuals’ claims about their inferiority and argue that racial mixture was not only beneficial, it was the hallmark of Latin American nations. During the twentieth century, ideologies of whitening, mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture), blackness, indigeneity and racial democracy informed national ideologies across Latin America. Instead of countering ideas of white supremacy espoused by European intellectuals, Latin American intellectuals and political leaders embraced white supremacy and worked to facilitate and justify a system of pervasive race and colour stratification whereby darker-skinned people, typically with more notable indigenous and African features, occupy the lower rungs of the racial ladder, and those of primarily European descent are at the top…

Read the entire article here.

Irish and white-ish mixed “race” identity and the scopic regime of whiteness

Women’s Studies International Forum
Volume 27, Issue 4, October–November 2004
pages 385-396
DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2004.10.007

Angeline D. Morrison
Falmouth College of Arts, Falmouth, Cornwall, United Kingdom

When speaking about the paradoxical “invisibility” of whiteness, I am referring in particular to Richard Dyer’s project to “make whiteness strange”, to hold it up for inspection and to question the tacit association of whiteness with unquestioned normality with the human condition Dyer points out that the unspoken understanding that whiteness is not a “raced” condition has very specific implications for the balance of power. “There is no more powerful position than being ‘just’ human. The claim of power is the claim to speak for the commodity of humanity. Raced people can’t do that—they can only speak for their race. But non-raced people can, for they do not represent the interests of a race” (Dyer, 1997, p. 2). Like blackness, whiteness is not reducible to a matter of simple visual appearance. However, when historical and political circumstances allow the conflation of the so-called “ideals” of whiteness–Enlightenment ideals such as literacy, civilisation, artistic creativity, scientific excellence, power, dignity, assumed superiority and so on—with a particular “race” or skin color (here, “white”), things start getting dangerous. The visual becomes vital, and the optical surface of the “raced” subject is imbued with I hyper-significance that can be very uncomfortable to wear. When this subject is of mixed “race” and thus occupies a range of different possible positions within, without, around and between the binary categories, difficulties can arise.

I use the term “mixed race” mindfully, aware that the term is contested by some, while others warn against its reference to die unscientific non-sense of “race” (Gilroy, 2000). Therefore, for the purposes of this article only, I want to define “mixed race” people as the offspring of one white and one non-white parent. If racialized society relies on the false foundational Logocentric binary “black white”, then it follows that it will taxonomize its subjects accordingly. Sander H. Gilman points out that, “. . .in this view of mankind, the black occupied the antithetical position to the white on the scale of humanity.” (Gilman, 1985, p. 231).

Concentrating on the visual, this article intends to use the figure of the mixed “race” subject to investigate the particular scopic regime of whiteness. I wish to consider some of the things that the dominant scopic regime accords visibility to, and some of those it does not. Clearly, what ends up being seen and the various interpretations the afforded depend largely on cultural registers, power relations, and epistemologies that continually shift the white phenotype of Irish people, for example, was all but “invisible” to the white scopic regime of the 19th Century Britain. The racist caricaturing of the Irish that is now so well documented…

Read or purchase the article here.

Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “Race-ing Toward the Real South Korea: The Cases of Black-Korean Nationals”

Seminar Series: Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective
University of California, Merced
California Room
5200 North Lake Rd.
Merced, California 95343
2013-11-07, 10:30 PDT (Local Time)

Nadia Y. Kim, Associate Professor of Sociology
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California

Students of South Korean multiculturalism have laudably given voice to the many non-Koreans who live in a proudly single-blood nation and have extensively criticized the state for its self-interested multicultural project.  Without critiquing these claims, Kim argues that the multicultural scholarship has omitted one of the important groups who diversify South Korea and find themselves on the bottom of most racialized orders: the part-Black children of USA-ROK military couplings. This dearth of works on Korean-Black children in particular is unexpected in light of Superbowl XL MVP Hines Ward’s 2006 visit being widely seen as the opening salvo on a multicultural South Korea.  Yet, because scholars are guided by the lens of the state on who the “multicultural citizens” are and because we typically opt for the conceptual language of ethnicity and ethnic nationalism over that of race and (ethno)racism, Black-descent populations tend to be overlooked.  By doing so, Kim argues, we as scholars inadvertently reify the country’s belief that Blacks are the most biologically and culturally different from them and perpetuate the relative “closeness” and state “privileging” of diasporic Koreans, Asians from the Pacific region, and lighter-skinned people who themselves, to be sure, endure inequality.  We also enable the state and like-minded adherents to promote policies of cultural assimilation of minorities that, in reality, deny pluralistic equality on the related basis of biological (racial) criteria.  Kim will conclude with the consequences of inadvertently reifying state hegemonic projects.

Associate Professor of Sociology at Loyola Marymount University, Kim researches ‘race’/ethnicity/nation, gender/relationality, citizenship, immigration/transnationalism, community politics, Asian American Studies, and Korean Studies. She authored the award-winning book Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to L.A. and is penning another on marginalized immigrant women of color, citizenship, and Environmental Justice.

The seminar series “Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective” is organized by Tanya Golash-Boza, Nigel Hatton, and David Torres-Rouff. The event is co-sponsored by the UC Center for New Racial Studies, Sociology, and SSHA.

For more information, click here.

Rearticulating Black Mixed-Race in the Era of Globalization: Hines Ward and the struggle for Koreanness in contemporary South Korean media

Cultural Studies
Volume 28, Issue 3, 2014
pages 391-417
DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2013.840665

Ji-Hyun Ahn
University of Texas, Austin

Since the mid-2000s, the term multiculturalism has entered the Korean lexicon as migration has become more and more prevalent due to globalization. The cornerstone of this multicultural explosion was a 2006 visit by American football star Hines Ward, born to an African-American father and a Korean mother. As a black mixed-race sports celebrity, he suddenly became an emblematic media figure in the Korean televisual landscape, signifying a broader racial reconfiguration in Korean society. This media event – what I shall call ‘the Hines Ward moment’ – created and opened the discursive space for racial politics and multicultural issues in Korean society. Hence, this article aims to look at what this discursive explosion of multiculturalism and mixed-race means in the context of globalization. Reading the Hines Ward moment as a symbolic media text, the paper examines how the media discourse on Hines Ward articulates the issues of national identity and racial politics in contemporary Korean society. For analysis, newspaper articles, television programmes and television commercials that deal with the Hines Ward case are examined. By analyzing the modes of articulation of the Hines Ward moment, this study deconstructs the image of a ‘global, multicultural Korea’ shaped by the Korean media and examines the struggle for Koreanness in the televisual area of contemporary Korean media.

Introduction: imagining a multicultural, global Korea?

There has been a common belief that South Korea (hereafter, Korea) has always been a racially homogeneous country because of the strong myth of ‘one people one nation’ (hankyoreh hanminjok) (Shin 2006, G.-S. Han 2007). However, this common myth no longer seems as effective as it was in the past…

Read or purchase the article here.