Mixed Race Studies

Artists, Educators Laud Black Heritage In Dominican Republic

The Associated Press
2013-10-11

Ezequiel Abiú López, Foreign Correspondent
The Associated Press

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) — In a school auditorium filled with laughing students, actresses Luz Bautista Matos and Clara Morel threw themselves into acting out a fairy tale complete with a princess, a hero and acts of derring-do.

Morel had wrapped a white plastic sheet around her multi-colored blouse, while Bautista donned a brown paper bag over her blue tights. The two black actresses wore their hair free and natural, decorated only with single pink flowers.

“Yes, you’re a princess,” said Bautista to Morel, who fretted that she didn’t look like a traditional princess with her dark complexion and hair. Bautista then turned to a young girl sitting in the front row, who shared the same African-descended features as both actresses. “And you too,” Morel said as the child smiled back at her.

The theater group Wonderful Tree has visited schools all over Santo Domingo and some in the countryside to spread the word among black children that their features and heritage should be a source of pride. That message, though simple, has been nothing less than startling in this Caribbean country, where 80 percent of people are classified as mulattos, meaning they have mixed black-white ancestry, but where many still consider being labeled black an offense.

Wonderful Tree represents a larger cultural movement that’s working to combat the country’s historic bias through arts and education. The Dominican choreographer Awilda Polanco runs a contemporary dance company that’s trying to rescue Afro-Caribbean traditions, while the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo has been training primary school teachers to respect and celebrate their students’ African heritage, including through skits that young children can more easily understand.

It’s a bid to transform a color-obsessed society where a majority of the country’s 10 million people choose to identify themselves as “Indio” — or “Indian” — on government documents despite their black roots, and many reject afros in favor of closely cropped hair or sleek blowouts. Public schools for decades even prohibited students from attending classes with their hair loose or in a natural frizz.

Such hair, in fact, is called “bad hair” in the local Spanish lexicon while straightened hair is “good hair.”…

…Women in the Dominican Republic spend an estimated 12 percent of their household budgets on hair salons and treatments, according to “Good Hair, Bad Hair,” which included an economic and anthropological study of Dominican beauty salons.

Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, who oversaw the killing of some 17,000 Haitians in 1937 in an effort to expel them from the Dominican Republic, was himself a mulatto who used makeup to make his face lighter.

Trujillo was the first to include the term “Indio” in official documents, said historian Emilio Cordero Michel…

Read the entire article here.

Despite Options on Census, Many to Check ‘Black’ Only

The New York Times
2000-02-12

Diana Jean Schemo

This year’s new, racially inclusive census might have seemed tailor made for Michael Gelobter.

The son of a white Jewish father and an African-Bermudan mother, Mr. Gelobter lives in Harlem with his wife, Sharron Williams, a black woman whose Caribbean background melds African and Indian influences. Creating their own cultural road map as they go, the couple embrace the range of their heritages and those of friends, marking Passover, for example, with an African-American Latino seder.

But when the census invites Mr. Gelobter, for the first time, to name all the races that describe him, he will do what he has always done, and claim just one: black. Checking more than one race, he contends, would undermine the influence of blacks by reducing their number as a distinct group and so most likely diluting public policies addressing their concerns.

The census forms that will be mailed to most Americans in April—the count began last month in Alaska, where the winter chill tends to keep people at home and easier to tally —offers a nod to the nation’s increasing diversity. No longer will the Census Bureau instruct respondents to ”select one” race to describe themselves. Instead, it will tell them to mark one or more of 14 boxes representing 6 races (and subcategories) that apply—white, black, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian Indian, other Asian and Pacific Islander—or to check ”some other race.”

But like Mr. Gelobter, many people, indeed most, who could claim more than one race are not expected to do so, demographers and census officials say.

Part of the reason, according to demographers, is habit: Americans are simply unaccustomed to the option. More profoundly, however, the change is fueling a weighty debate about the meaning of race, in which interpretations of history, politics and experience frequently overshadow the simpler matter of parentage.

Thirty years after Loving v. Virginia struck down the last laws barring interracial marriage, the new change in the census and the ensuing controversy have become a barometer of the complexity of American attitudes toward race, and their contradictions. With the 6 racial categories offering 63 possible combinations of racial identity, which government demographers will tabulate as distinct groups, the census could provide a remarkably meticulous racial profile of American society.

On one side of the debate stand those who see the revision as a tactic to divide blacks at a time when affirmative action and other remedies to discrimination are under attack. Opposing them are multiracial Americans who resent having to identify with just one part of their heritage.

Apart from his perception that the change could diminish blacks’ influence, Mr. Gelobter, a 38-year-old professor of environmental policy at Rutgers University, said that claiming a multiracial identity would link him to a bitter, freighted history of privilege for blacks who could cite some white lineage.

“Should Frederick Douglass have checked white and black?” Mr. Gelobter said. ”Should W. E. B. Du Bois have checked white and black? He practically looked white.”…

…Kerry Ann Rockquemore, a sociologist at Pepperdine University, polled 250 college students who had one black parent and one white, and found that those reared in middle-class or affluent white neighborhoods tended to identify as biracial, while those who had grown up in black communities generally considered themselves black.

How will nonblacks of mixed race answer the census? There is little more than anecdotal evidence. But some experts note that checking options like Asian and white, or American Indian and Pacific Islander, does not carry the same historical baggage that mixed-race blacks confront in deciding whether to say they are part white.

Scott Wasmuth, who is white and has a Filipino wife, said that when he filled out the census in 1990, he ignored the one-race-only rule that then prevailed and checked both white and Asian to describe his daughters. This year he will do the same. ”People are beginning to say, ‘I’m a mixture, and I don’t have to choose one or the other,’ ” he said.

Bertrand Wade, a 34-year-old industrial electronics technician from Brooklyn, wishes he could avoid descriptions altogether. His father is half-black and half-white, and his mother is East Indian and white.

When applications ask his race and none of the boxes fit, Mr. Wade said, ”the first thing I feel is excluded; then sometimes I feel that I should not be in a position where I have to state my race.” He said that on the census, he would check all the boxes that describe his heritage.

Charles Byrd, who runs a Web site called Inter Racial Voice, said, ”What we need to do as a country is get rid of these stupid boxes altogether.”

On the 1990 census, about 10 million Americans seemed to agree. They did not identify themselves as members of any race, said Margo J. Anderson, author of ”The American Census: A Social History” (Yale University Press, 1988). Another quarter-million, ignoring the instructions, identified themselves as belonging to more than one race.

Ms. Anderson said that ever since the first head count, in 1790, the census had played an important if subtle role in reflecting preoccupations and shaping social thought. It is only in the last century, though, that the government has devised questions to identify the country’s ethnic makeup. In the 1910 census, for instance, the government asked people their mother tongue, looking for Yiddish as the answer in order to tally the number of Jewish immigrants.

”The changes in questions always come about because of the social issues of the day,” Ms. Anderson said.

Susan Graham, head of Project RACE, a civic group that unsuccessfully pushed for a separate ”multiracial” box for the census, said she wanted a single category that would accurately define her children.

”Think of when you open a newspaper and see pie charts,” she said. ”We wanted a slice of the pie that says ‘multiracial.’ ”…

Read the entire article here.

Unraveling the Concept of Race in Brazil: Issues for the Rio de Janeiro Cooperative Agreement Site

Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
Volume 30,  Issue 3, 1998 
Special Issue: HIV/AIDS Interventions For Out-of-Treatment Drug Users
pages 255-260
DOI: 10.1080/02791072.1998.10399700

Hilary L. Surratt
The Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies
University of Delaware

James A. Inciardi (1939-2009), Co-Director of the Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies; Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice
University of Delaware

Scholars throughout the Americas have spent much of the 20th century studying race and its meaning in Brazil. Racial identities in Brazil are dynamic concepts which can only be understood if situated and explored within the appropriate cultural context. Empirical evidence of the fluidity of racial identification quickly came to the authors’ attention within the context of a prevention initiative targeting segments of the Rio de Janeiro population at high risk for HIV/AIDS. Because the main objective of this program was to slow the spread of AIDS through an intervention designed to promote behavioral change, comparisons of client data at the baseline and follow-up assessments for the core of the analyses. Through quality control procedures used to link client information collected at different points in time, it was revealed that 106 clients, or 12.5% of the follow-up sample, had changed their racial self-identification. The authors’ attempts to engage project staff in a dialogue about the fluidity of racial identity among these clients have provided some insight into what might be called the “contextual redefinition” of race in Brazil. Within the framework of this study, the ramifications of this phenomenon are clear. Racial comparisons of HIV risk, sexual activity, drug use, and behavioral change, which are part and parcel of U.S.-based research, would appear to be of little utility in this setting.

Read or purchase the article here.

Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self

Columbia University Press
June 2007
360 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-14002-7

Laura Bear
Department of Anthropology
The London School of Economics

Lines of the Nation radically recasts the history of the Indian railways, which have long been regarded as vectors of modernity and economic prosperity. From the design of carriages to the architecture of stations, employment hierarchies, and the construction of employee housing, Laura Bear explores the new public spaces and social relationships created by the railway bureaucracy. She then traces their influence on the formation of contemporary Indian nationalism, personal sentiments, and popular memory. Her probing study challenges entrenched beliefs concerning the institutions of modernity and capitalism by showing that these rework older idioms of social distinction and are legitimized by forms of intimate, affective politics.

Drawing on historical and ethnographic research in the company town at Kharagpur and at the Eastern Railway headquarters in Kolkata (Calcutta), Bear focuses on how political and domestic practices among workers became entangled with the moralities and archival technologies of the railway bureaucracy and illuminates the impact of this history today. The bureaucracy has played a pivotal role in the creation of idioms of family history, kinship, and ethics, and its special categorization of Anglo-Indian workers still resonates. Anglo-Indians were formed as a separate railway caste by Raj-era racial employment and housing policies, and other railway workers continue to see them as remnants of the colonial past and as a polluting influence.

The experiences of Anglo-Indians, who are at the core of the ethnography, reveal the consequences of attempts to make political communities legitimate in family lines and sentiments. Their situation also compels us to rethink the importance of documentary practices and nationalism to all family histories and senses of relatedness. This interdisciplinary anthropological history throws new light not only on the imperial and national past of South Asia but also on the moral life of present technologies and economic institutions.

Public genealogies: Documents, bodies and nations in Anglo-Indian railway family histories

Contributions to Indian Sociology
Volume 35, Number 3 (October 2001)
pages 355-388
DOI: 10.1177/006996670103500303

Laura Bear
Department of Anthropology
The London School of Economics

This article argues for an approach to archives and documents that focusses on their material effects. It traces the impact of the East Indian Railway Nationality Files on the intimate stories of family genealogies among Anglo-Indian railway workers. The procedures of proof and record-keeping associated with these files (kept from 1927-50) displaced Anglo-Indian family histories into a public realm of state documents and archives, making these the final arbiters and guardians of their origins. Anglo-Indian workers often protested their assigned status by writing to the bureaucracy, especially as family members were regularly classed differently by distinct institutions. They sought a continuous public genealogy for themselves. Their interest in doing this and the practices of the nationality archive reveal the new conjunctions between political rights and family origins in Indian civil society. Increasingly, both the jati of nationalists and the enumerable community of colonial bureaucrats rested on a genealogical imperative, which excluded Anglo-Indians because of their ‘mixed’ origins from belonging to either India or Britain. The material effects of this historical moment and the archive are visible in contemporary conversations with Anglo-Indian railway families. They tell stories of disappearing documents, of ghosts disturbed by lack of an archive, of their bodies as treacherous records of identity and of the impossibilities of being an Indian community.

Read or purchase the article here.

Forced to pass and other sins against authenticity

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Volume 15, Issue 1, 2005
pages 17-32
DOI: 10.1080/07407700508571486

Kerry Ann Rockquemore

According to the identity commandments, passing is a sin against authenticity. Thou shall not pretend to be something that you are not. Men should not pretend to be women, married people should not pretend to be single, and black people should not pretend to be white. We all fit into some neat conglomeration of social categories and it’s just too confusing if we can’t take people at face value. Racial passing has a particular hold on our collective imagination because we assume that individuals belong to one, and only one, biologically defined racial group. This assumption disallows the possibility of being “mixed-race” and has historically necessitated elaborate rules and regulations order to classify what folks really are. The one-drop rule, a uniquely American norm that reflects our particular history of racial formation, dictates that people with any black ancestry whatsoever are black. Given the explicit racial hierarchy in the U.S., racial passing has always referred to a person who was really black pretending to be white.

As a woman who is black by self-definition, white by phenotype, and biracial by parentage, I am often perplexed by our limited conception of passing in post-Civil Rights America. Because we persist in assuming that race is a biological reality and not a social construction, passing continues to be conceptualized as voluntary; uni-…

Read or purchase the article here.

Is race erased? Decoding race from patterns of neural activity when skin color is not diagnostic of group boundaries

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
Volume 8, Issue 7 (October 2013)
pages 750-755
DOI: 10.1093/scan/nss063

Kyle G. Ratner
Department of Psychology
New York University

Christian Kaul
Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science
New York University

Jay J. Van Bavel, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology
New York University

Several theories suggest that people do not represent race when it does not signify group boundaries. However, race is a visually salient social category associated with skin tone and facial features. In the current study, we investigated whether race could be decoded from distributed patterns of neural activity in the fusiform gyri and early visual cortex when visual features that often co-vary with race were orthogonal to group membership. To this end, we used multivariate pattern analysis to examine an fMRI dataset that was collected while participants assigned to mixed-race groups categorized own-race and other-race faces as belonging to their newly assigned group. Whereas conventional univariate analyses provided no evidence of biased race-based responses in the fusiform gyri or early visual cortex, multivariate pattern analysis suggested that race was represented within these regions. Moreover, race was represented in the fusiform gyri to a greater extent than early visual cortex, suggesting that the fusiform gyri results do not merely reflect low-level perceptual information (e.g., color, contrast) from early visual cortex. The findings indicate that patterns of activation within specific regions of the visual cortex may represent race even when overall activation in these regions is not driven by racial information.

Read the entire article here.

Professor discusses covert racism

The Dartmouth
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire
2013-09-27

Bryn Morgan

Though racism is more covert today, blacks are subject to the same prejudice as they were in the 1960s, Duke University sociology professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argued in a lecture on Thursday. Bonilla-Silva said a new form of racism has emerged, replacing Jim Crow racism.

“We are not post-racial,” he said. “This ideology is suave but deadly.”

Focusing on relations between whites and blacks, Bonilla-Silva said the latter’s current economic status has remained the same in recent decades, even as the forms of subordination and racism have since evolved.

After describing various ways in which this ideology is prevalent in today’s society, Bonilla-Silva presented three main points about color-blind racism: the forms of interpreting racism, rhetorical strategies for articulating racism and stories contextualizing racism.

Bonilla-Silva said whites believe that they are not racist and often use the election of President Barack Obama to support the claim that America has moved beyond its racially tense past…

Read the entire article here.

Double the trouble, twice the joy for Japan’s hāfu

The Japan Times
2013-10-03

Kaori Shoji, Special To The Japan Times

Until about 10 years ago, the standard Japanese image of kids of mixed blood was that they were 1) gorgeous, 2) rich and 3) able to live in Japan with none of the kinks and hang out at Azabu clubs when they were 13. In high school, my girlfriends scorned their own Japanese heritage. The common reply to what we wanted to be when we graduated was “gaijin” (foreigner). Failing that, the next best option was to marry a gaijin and bear hāfu (mixed-race) kids, who would then automatically go on to have brilliant careers as newscasters or supermodels.

Megumi Nishikura and Lara Perez Takagi’s documentary “Hafu” shows quite a different picture. “One of the reasons we made this film,” Nishikura tells The Japan Times, “is that the growing number of hāfu here are not celebrities or models. We wanted to put a hole in the stereotype of hāfu — to show that not everyone is Caucasian, well-to-do and beautiful. There are a lot of people who aren’t like that, who are struggling with the language, with life in Japan and with their own identities.”

Both the filmmakers, who each have a background in documentaries, are mixed-race. Perez Takagi was born to a Japanese mother and Spanish father, and her childhood was divided by vacations spent in Japan at her grandmother’s house in Chiba and daily home life in Madrid…

Read the entire article here.

Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America [Review]

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews
Volume 42, Number 5 (September 2013)
page 763
DOI: 10.1177/0094306113499714e

Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America, by Michael P. Jeffries. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. 210pp. paper. ISBN: 9780804780964.

The ascendancy of Barack Obama from an orphan raised by his grandparents to the most powerful man on the planet is extraordinary not only due to its rapid progression, but also because of its impact on racism in America. Surely the election of a black President will heal America’s wounds of modern racism and erase the scars of slavery. However, in his poignant book Paint the White House Black, Michael P. Jeffries points out that President Obama’s election has placed the United States no closer to the idealized post-racial society that many Americans seem to strive for. Indeed, if anything, the election of America’s first black President raises interesting questions about the nature and pervasiveness of race.

In his book, Jeffries skillfully outlines his thesis, beginning with a description of the politics of inheritance, the racialized natureof patriotism, and the intersectionality of black identity and nationalism. He proceeds with a discussion of multiracial identity and its impact on black politics by incorporating theoretical arguments made by others, as well as his own analysis of self-collected interview data. Next, Jeffries discusses the intersection of gender and blackness by focusing on the First Lady, Michelle Obama, before concluding with a concise chapter that summarizes his arguments quite nicely. The writing is both accessible and direct. Though the scholarly nature of this work requires the inclusion of specialized jargon, the detailed notes section leaves the reader with all the information needed to fully understand this topic…

Read the entire review here.