Mixed Race Studies

Esther J. Cepeda: Debate grows over Hispanics and the 2020 Census

San Jose Mercury News
San Jose, California
2013-09-07

Esther J. Cepeda, Columnist
The Washington Post

CHICAGO—A debate is raging about whether the U.S. Census Bureau should offer Hispanics the option of identifying themselves as a separate race in the 2020 count. But let’s instead ponder how accurately they’ll be defined.

According to a new study by Duke University professor Jen’nan Ghazal Read, policymakers should be working hard to ensure that demographic subgroups are portrayed as accurately as the data allow.

“While it’s great that people are concerned about how they want to self-identify, what I’m concerned about is the information we overlook,” Read told me as she described research she conducted on Public Use Microdata Samples, or PUMS, from the 2000 census.

In her study published in the journal Population Research and Policy Review, Read used two distinct subgroups, Mexicans and Arabs, to tease out very different stories about the nature of their circumstances compared to how the census usually describes them.

She found that if the census broadened its standard definition to include people who don’t identify themselves as Hispanic or Latino—but who were nonetheless born in Mexico or report Mexican ancestry—in the “Mexican” Hispanic origin question, the number of Mexican-Americans known to be legally in the U.S. would increase nearly 10 percent…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Mixed emotions: Reflections on researching racial mixing and mixedness

Emotion, Space and Society
Volume 11, May 2014
pages 79–88
DOI: 10.1016/j.emospa.2013.07.002

Chamion Cabellero, Senior Research Fellow
Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

Researching racial and ethnic issues can involve entering a highly emotive terrain and the subject of ‘mixed race’ is no exception. The growing collection of both historical and contemporary accounts of those who are perceived to be mixing or of mixed race highlight the often intense emotions involved in crossing perceived boundaries of colour and culture. Yet, whilst discussions of the sensitivities and politics facing those mixing or of mixed race form the backbone of much research into the subject, much less is said about these issues in relation to the research process. Such reflections, however, are important not only for making sense of the frequent intensity of emotion that emerges from such research but also as regards constructing, conducting and disseminating it. Drawing in particular on a number of research projects conducted by the author and colleagues, this paper will discuss some of the emotive issues involved in researching the notion of ‘mixedness’ and their methodological implications for researchers as well as the research field itself.

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SO224: The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

London School of Economics
2013/2014 session

Helen Kim

The course provides an introduction to theoretical, historical and contemporary debates around race, racism and ethnicity. It firstly explores the main theoretical perspectives which have been used to analyse racial and ethnic relations, in a historical and contemporary framework. It then examines in more detail the areas both theoretical and lived within our contemporary social and political climate where analyses of ‘race’, racism, culture, belonging and identity are urgently needed, focusing primarily on Britain, Europe and the US. Topics include: race and ethnicity in historical perspective; race, class and gender multiculturalism; diaspora and hybridity; whiteness; mixed race; race, disease and contamination; race and the senses; race and popular culture; urban multiculture and the street; race, riots and youth culture; community cohesion; Muslim identities; asylum and new migrations; the Far Right and the white working class.

Kinship and Identity: Mixed Bloods in Urban Indian Communities

American Indian Culture and Research Journal
ISSN 0161-6463 (Print)
Volume 23, Number 2 (1999)
Pages 73-89

Susan Applegate Krouse [Ziigwam Nibi Kwe (Spring Water Woman) Haslett] (1955-2010), Associate Professor of Anthropology
Michigan State University

INTRODUCTION

American Indians have become an increasingly urban population in the twentieth century, moving away from their rural home communities and reservations in search of jobs or schooling. This movement to cities has resulted in higher rates of intermarriage with non-Indians for urban Indians than for rural Indians and consequently higher numbers of mixed bloods in urban areas than on reservations. Today, many of those urban mixed bloods are interested in claiming their Indian identity and learning more about their culture, but they often lack both physical characteristics and cultural knowledge that would allow them readily to assert their Indianness. Consequently, they turn to kinship—an important component of American Indian communities, whether urban, rural, or reservation—to provide an entry into the urban Indian community. By aligning themselves with a larger structure of family and relations, mixed bloods fit into an existing framework and community. This paper examines the effectiveness and the limitations of kinship-based identity for mixed bloods in urban Indian communities.

The population under study here is mixed bloods who, because of their parents’ or grandparents’ move to the city and subsequent marriage to non-Indians, have lost ties to their tribal communities. They may be a single generation removed from their tribes or many generations, but they are defined for purposes of this study as a population with mixed ancestry, urban for one or more generations, without clear ties to a reservation or tribal community. This study examines those people who are hoping to establish or reestablish ties to their Indian identity, and one strategy for doing so—through kinship—and excludes mixed bloods who have maintained community ties as well as full bloods who have lost ties to their tribal communities through relocation or adoption. This paper is concerned specifically with the problems of mixed…

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Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “Colorblind?: The Contradictions of Racial Classification”

Seminar Series: Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective
University of California, Merced
California Room
5200 North Lake Rd.
Merced, California 95343
2013-09-19, 10:30 PDT (Local Time)

Michael Omi, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley

The dominant racial ideology of colorblindness in the United States holds that the most effective anti-racist policy, and practice, is to ignore race. Issues continue to arise, however, that present a set of contradictions for colorblind ideology by “noticing” race. On-going debates about racial data collection by the state and the “rebiologization” of race in biomedical research and DNA sampling illustrate, in different ways, the inherently problematic character of racial classification.

Michael Omi is associate professor of Ethnic Studies and the associate director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society (HIFIS) at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the co-author of Racial Formation in the United States, a groundbreaking work that transformed how we understand the social and historical forces that give race its changing meaning over time and place. Professor Omi’s research interests include racial theory and politics, racial/ethnic classification and the census, Asians Americans and racial stratification, and racist and anti-racist social movements. He is a recipient of UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award—an honor bestowed on only 240 Berkeley faculty members since the award’s inception in 1959.

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.

The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje

Michigan State University Press
2013-11-01
310 pages
6 in x 9 in
Paperback ISBN: 9781611860863
eBook ISBN: 9781609173753

Pancho McFarland, Associate Professor of Sociology
Chicago State University

The population of Mexican-origin peoples in the United States is a diverse one, as reflected by age, class, gender, sexuality, and religion. Far from antiquated concepts of mestizaje, recent scholarship has shown that Mexican@/Chican@ culture is a mixture of indigenous, African, and Spanish and other European peoples and cultures. No one reflects this rich blend of cultures better than Chican@ rappers, whose lyrics and iconography can help to deepen our understanding of what it means to be Chican@ or Mexican@ today. While some identify as Mexican mestizos, others identify as indigenous people or base their identities on their class and racial/ethnic makeup. No less significant is the intimate level of contact between Chican@s and black Americans. Via a firm theoretical foundation and a collection of vibrant essays, Pancho McFarland explores the language and ethos of Chican@/Mexican@ hip hop and sheds new light on three distinct identities reflected in the music: indigenous/Mexica, Mexican nationalist/immigrant, and street hopper. With particular attention to the intersection of black and Chicano cultures, the author places exciting recent developments in music forms within the context of progressive social change, social justice, identity, and a new transnational, polycultural America.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Ruben O. Martinez
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PART 1. SETTING THE THEORETICAL CONTEXT
  • Chapter 1. Quién es más macho? Quién es más Mexicano?: Chican@ and Mexicans Identities in Rap
  • Chapter 2. Barrio Logos: Tlie Sacred and Profane Word of Chicano Emcees
• PART 2. IDENTITIES OLD AND NEW
  • Chapter 3. Sonido Indígena: Mexica Hip-Hop and Masculine Identity
  • Chapter 4. Paísas, Compas, Inmigrantes: Mexicanidad in Hip-Hop
  • Chapter 5. Barrio Locos: Street Hop and Amerikan Identity
• PART 3. MEXICANIDAD, AFRICANIDAD
  • Chapter 6. Multiracial Macho: Kemo the Blaxican’s Hip-Hop Masculinity
  • Chapter 7. The Rap on Chicano/Mexicano and Black Masculinity: Gender and Cross-Cultural Exchange
  • Chapter 8. “Soy la Kalle”: Radio, Reggaetón, and Latin@ Identity
• PART 4. HIP-HOP AND JUSTICE
  • Chapter 9. Teaching Hip-Hop: A Pedagogy for Social Justice
  • Afterword. Hip-Hop and Freedom-Dreaming in the Mexican Diaspora
• Appendix. Music Sources
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX

Will Interracial Relationships Ever Be Common on TV?

Bitch Magazine
2013-09-04

Sophia Seawell

I’m usually skeptical of advertising. I know companies spend millions of dollars hoping that their body lotion or paper towels or lunch meat will bring me to tears.

But ads are powerful. They’re a form of media where we see representations of ourselves and our society, just like on TV shows they interrupt. And it’s rare to see people like me—with a black father and a white mother—represented in ads.

Earlier this year, like many other people, I heard about a Cheerios ad, “Just Checking,” that featured an interracial family—a white mother, black father and their daughter—before I saw it. I was excited about it, sure, but why I was excited didn’t really register until I finally did see it for myself…

…The Cheerios ad caused stirred up some racist controversy, leaving many people wondering why interracial relationships still have the ability to alarm 46 years after the Supreme Court struck down laws that banned interracial marriages in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case. Clearly the idea that interracial relationships are not okay runs deeper than we’d like to think.

A half-century isn’t enough time to dissolve the well-engrained ideas about race and marriage that were constructed after the Civil War, when miscegenation laws spread across the country “to serve as props for the racial system of slavery, as one more way to distinguish free Whites from slaves,”  as historian Peggy Pascoe puts it. The idea that mixing of races was unnatural, against God’s will, and would lead to biological degradation made miscegenation laws a tool to define what a legitimate family was and thereby maintain white supremacy. 

At the time of the Loving v. Virginia decision, seventeen states still had miscegenation laws in place. In fact, it took Alabama until 2000 to officially amend their law. Even more recently, in 2009, a judge in Louisiana refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple.

Meanwhile, according to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of interracial marriage reached all-time high in 2010. In that year, about 15 percent of all new marriages were interracial and 8.4 percent of all existing marriages were interracial.

But films, TV, and advertising haven’t caught up to the current racial reality…

Read the entire article here.

Black and white in America: The culture and politics of racial classification

International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society
Volume 7, Issue 2 (Winter 1993)
pages 229-258
DOI: 10.1007/BF02283196

Ernest Evans Kilker

The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and external career for a variety of individuals . . . The first fruit of this imagination —and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his chances in life only by becoming aware of all those individuals in his circumstances . . . The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. —C. W. Mills

It is in race that the postmodern world today finds its most exemplary vanishing point. Race appears as if it is fixed and permanent, immune to being altered by the ideas or expressions used to address or comprehend it. Yet what does it really mean? To what extent does it have anything to say about specifiable differences between peoples, cultures and histories? The point here is when we talk about race we are never sure what we are referring to: a dilemma which posits many contradictory futures and opportunities. —Timothy Maliqualim Simone

THE POLITICS OF RACIAL CLASSIFICATION

Who is Black? Is there any “scientific” and “objective” answer or simply a cultural and “subjective one? In a racist culture, the answer to this question is fraught with political, economic, legal, familial, psychological, and sexual intended and unintended consequences. Surprisingly, the first book length sociological survey treatment of this subject, by F. James Davis appeared only last year (Davis, 1991: ix). Davis himself admits that the theoretical connections, to phenomenological, symbolic interactionist, structural, and conflict theories, which his excellent work implicitly suggests, go unexplored (Davis, 1991: x). Although we take for granted our definition of “black” which pivots on the Louisiana “one drop” or “any known black ancestry” rule (Dominquez, 1986), cross culturally its definition and meanings are extremely variable (Adams, 1969; Hoetnik, 1967; Lowenthal, 1969; Pierson, 1942; Freyre, 1963). In addition, historical studies of racial miscegenation and mulattos in the United States are few and far between (Williamson, 1980: xi; Reuter, 1918).

Because of the amount of interbreeding that has taken place over the last several thousand years, the scientific status of the biological concept of race is an especially dubious one (Simone, 1989). What exists is a spectrum and continuum of human types which share certain physical traits in an almost infinite variety of combinations (Kuper, 1975; Montagu, 1965). However, from a cultural point of view, the American belief in the biological reality of race is still a pervasive one. In our racist culture, any known black ancestry (i.e. “one drop”) can lead to the societal designation of the individual genetically as “black” — even if the individual is overwhelmingly “white.” As a result of this cultural rule, many black leaders, who were significantly and even predominantly white, were defined and defined themselves as “black.” The most dramatic example on this longand illustrious list (which would include Frederick Douglass, Booker T, Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, A. Phillip Randolph, and Adam Clayton Powell) is Walter White, head of the NAACP from 1931-1955, who anthropologists estimate could not have been more than one sixty-fourth African black (Davis, 1991:7). Walter White “passed for white” when he went “undercover” while investigating lynchings in the South for the NAACP. In addition in 1923 he deceived Edward Y. Clark, a Ku Klux Klan recruiter, into inviting him to Atlanta to advise him on recruitment. However his cover was blown before the trip could take place (Lewis, 1979: 131). In the same year he managed to embarass many a federal legislator, while lobbying for an anti-lynching bill. When they discovered White was Black, they regretted their candor (Lewis, 1979: 132). Even Malcolm X, the individual most responsible for the black consciousness and black power movement in the United States, had a white rapist for a grandfather and a mother who, for employment purposes, regularly “passed for white” (Haley, 1964: 2). Malcolm’s mother, Louise, claimed that if she scrubbed the young Malcolm hard and often enough, “I can make him look almost white” (Perry, 1991: p. 5). Once Malcolm himself converted to the nation of Islam, he regularly took “skin baths” in the sun to deepen his self-described “light” skin tone (Perry, 1991: 117)…

Read or purchase the article here.

Genetic Bio-Ancestry and Social Construction of Racial Classification in Social Surveys in the Contemporary United States

Demography
September 2013
32 pages
DOI: 10.1007/s13524-013-0242-0-0

Guang Guo, Professor of Sociology
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Yilan Fu

Hedwig Lee

Tianji Cai

Kathleen Mullan Harris

Yi Li

Self-reported race is generally considered the basis for racial classification in social surveys, including the U.S. census. Drawing on recent advances in human molecular genetics and social science perspectives of socially constructed race, our study takes into account both genetic bio-ancestry and social context in understanding racial classification. This article accomplishes two objectives. First, our research establishes geographic genetic bio-ancestry as a component of racial classification. Second, it shows how social forces trump biology in racial classification and/or how social context interacts with bio-ancestry in shaping racial classification. The findings were replicated in two racially and ethnically diverse data sets: the College Roommate Study (N = 2,065) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 2,281).

Read or purchase the article here.

Book Review: Land of the Cosmic Race: Race Mixture, Racism and Blackness in Mexico

LSE Review of Books
London School of Economics
2013-08-30

Zalfa Feghali, Editorial Assistant
Journal of American Studies

Land of the Cosmic Race is a richly-detailed ethnographic account of the powerful role that race and colour play in organizing the lives and thoughts of ordinary Mexicans. It presents a previously untold story of how individuals in contemporary urban Mexico construct their identities, attitudes, and practices in the context of a dominant national belief system. Carefully presented and self-consciously written, this is an excellent book for anyone with an interest in how Mexican racial politics can be seen to operate on the ground, finds Zalfa Feghali.

Land of the Cosmic Race: Race Mixture, Racism, and Blackness in Mexico. Christina A. Sue. Oxford University Press. March 2013.

One prevailing fact of studying race in the Americas is that the discussion almost always turns to the US as a reference point. Studies of racial dynamics in the Americas are—obviously—rich, necessary, and often sidelined in favour of these more popular ways of thinking about race. Christina A. Sue’s Land of the Cosmic Race: Race Mixture, Racism and Blackness in Mexico attempts to redress this imbalance by complicating and problematising the dynamics of racial mixture in Mexico. Primarily an ethnographic study, this book offers new ways of thinking about race studies in the Mexican context.

The book’s title, which Sue discusses but doesn’t fully unpack, is taken from a provocative work by Jose Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race, published in 1925. Vasconcelos’ views on mestizaje­—racial mixture—are key to understanding the dominant ideological logic behind Mexico’s national(ist) relationship with race. In The Cosmic Race, Vasconcelos sees the vast potential of (specifically) Mexicans as mestizos, and lauds them for their mestizo/a (mixed race, specifically Spanish and Indigenous) character. Significantly, he also casts the mestizos as the first stage in the creation of a new, cosmic race that will eventually take on characteristics and subsume the genetic streams of “all the races.” According to his logic, this cosmic race would take on the best or most desirable traits from each respective race and eventually lines between the “original” races will blur to the point that any one individual’s “racial heritage” would be completely indistinguishable from another’s, thus becoming the ultimate mestizo/a (something akin what some might now call a post-ethnic or post-racial world)…

Read the entire review here.