Mixed Race Studies

Race and the Census: The “Negro” Controversy

Pew Research: Social & Demographic Trends
Pew Research Center
2010-01-21

D’Vera Cohn, Senior Writer

The topic of racial identification on census forms has a long, fascinating history, which has generated fresh debate as the 2010 Census begins. Why, some ask, does the form include the word “Negro,” along with “black” and “African American,” among the options that Americans can choose for their self-identification? Isn’t that term out of date?

As you can see from the review that follows here, racial terms have come in and out of favor from one decade to the next. There was a similar debate about “Negro” in the 2000 Census, as there have been about other race terms in previous census years.

Before 1960, census-takers filled out the enumeration forms and chose the category for each American they counted. They used a detailed set of instructions from the government, key points of which are listed below. The 1960 Census was a transitional year in which census-takers chose the race for some Americans, and others self-identified from a list of categories.  From 1970 to 1990, most Americans filled out their own forms and checked off a race category for themselves. Starting in 2000, they could choose more than one.

When the census began in 1790, the racial categories for the household population were “free white” persons, other “free persons” by color, and “slaves.” Census-takers did not use standard forms in the early censuses.

For 1850-1880, the codes for enumerators were generally white (W), black (B) and mulatto (M). Beginning in 1850, the data item was labeled “color.” In 1870, Chinese (C) and Indian (I) were added. In 1880, the data item was not labeled; it was “whether this person is…” In 1890, “Japanese,” “quadroon” and “octoroon” were added…

Read the entire article here.

Mixing it Up

Salon
2001-03-08

Suzy Hansen

Alabama just legalized black-white marriage. An expert talks about why it took so long and the American obsession with racial purity.

In November 2000, after a statewide vote in a special election, Alabama became the last state to overturn a law that was an ugly reminder of America’s past, a ban on interracial marriage. The one-time home of George Wallace and Martin Luther King Jr. had held onto the provision for 33 years after the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. Yet as the election revealed — 40 percent of Alabamans voted to keep the ban — many people still see the necessity for a law that prohibits blacks and whites from mixing blood.

Werner Sollors, a professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard, was born in Germany and came to the United States in 1978. He has been studying and writing about the history of American interracial relationships since 1986. Sollors is the editor of the recently published “Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law,” a fascinating survey of legal decisions, literary criticism and essays by writers and scholars including Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and Randall Kennedy. Salon spoke with Sollors by phone from his office in Cambridge about the mixed-race origins — and multiracial future — of the nation.

What took Alabama so long to overturn its anti-miscegenation law?

In the years after the Civil War, most of the Southern states made miscegenation bans part of their constitutions. And part of the constitutional provision was that no legislation should ever change them. These were not just ordinary laws that you could modify with a simple majority; they called for very complicated processes and very large majorities to be overturned.

In 1967, the Supreme Court invalidated these anti-miscegenation provisions with the Loving vs. Virginia case, and the Southern states began to adjust. But not right away. In the first 10 or 15 years, there wasn’t a lot of activism or popular support for having the laws changed — no politician wanted to be caught trying to remove those statutes. I think Mississippi did it in 1987 or 1988 — 20 years after the Loving vs. Virginia case…

…What’s been going on with racial categories in the census is also interesting.

The census had two rules. One is the 1997 rule that permitted everyone to mark more than one box in the 2000 census. Then came the 2000 evaluation procedure, which allowed the census to classify anyone who marked more than one box as part of the “people of color” category — if there was a white and color mix indicated.

Essentially, it’s one thing to say that a person can fall into multiple racial categories, but what happens to all the people in the old categories? It can have some disastrous consequences now because in some states, apparently many white Americans found it fashionable to indicate that they were Native American. In some counties where Native Americans were a minority they may now end up as a majority. There are lots of headaches with counting and civil rights and voting rights and districting that are going to come in the next two years as a result of this census decision…

Read the entire interview here.

Confounding Identity: Exploring the Life and Discourse of Lucy E. Parsons

Berks Conference for Women Historians
2011
29 pages

Michelle Diane Wright, Assistant Professor of History
Community College of Baltimore County

Despite the vast research conducted on radical activist history of late nineteenth century Chicago, there is very little that examines political and social ideologies that diverged from the westernized male archetype of the era. Furthermore, the contrived disciplinary divide that separates scholarly study into artificial and static compartments such as labor history, anarchist history, women’s studies or others, oversimplifies the contributions of individuals that straddle all categories of endeavor. Lucy Parsons, a woman of color, was born in Waco, Texas in 1853 but moved to Chicago in 1873 and became a pivotal figure in the labor and anarchist movements well into the early twentieth century causing the Chicago Police Department to label her “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” Frequently overshadowed by the eminence of her husband Albert Parsons—labeled by many a Haymarket martyr—Lucy Parsons was a significant agitator in her own right and navigated a path for herself far outside the realm of the predominant thinking of other revolutionaries at that time. This paper examines the life and discourse of Lucy Parsons in an effort to contend with seemingly contradictory disciplines and perspectives in order to synthesize a holistic approach to a woman who confounds the strict identities that many have forced on her. Lucy Parsons’ impact upon concepts of injustice, governmental repression and labor inequalities come from a paradigm often marginalized and misinterpreted not only because it wasn’t derived from a source that was European or male, but also because her views came from a mind unconcerned with convention in relation to accepted societal standards. I am conducting research on the contributions of Lucy Parsons in order to write an accurate, comprehensive biography that also dissects marginalized perspectives of widely accepted historical accounts. In turn, I endeavor to provide a fuller and more holistic consideration of a historic period many assume is already understood.

Black By Default?

Lucy Parsons was born in Waco, Texas, in 1853 but moved to Chicago in 1873 where she lived until her death in 1942. She was a pivotal figure in several radical movements well into the early twentieth century causing the Chicago Police Department to label her “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” Scholars, including biographer Carolyn Ashbaugh, have categorized Parsons solely African American although she never embraced the designation herself. Lucy Parsons publicly claimed to possess Mexican and Native American extraction. As was often the case of nineteenth century social mores, ill-informed Whites with social agendas centered on White supremacy designed racial categories employing superficial visual characteristics such as skin color, facial features and hair texture. In order to maintain White preeminence racial descriptions were dichotomous labels of White or Black, generally resulting in individuals possessing one drop of any non-European blood being deemed Black by default.

Further confounding public perception, Lucy Parsons was essentially, but not legally, married to a White man. Her husband, moreover, was one of the four men hanged following the Haymarket Massacre that occurred in Chicago in 1886, a fact that often overshadows the significant contributions of Lucy Parsons. Contrived labels such as of miscegenation or amalgamation clouded the legacy of Lucy Parsons as mainstream newspapers and other contemporaries publicly relegated her solely to the category of Black for no other reason than to discredit her efforts as well as those of her husband.

This essay analyzes the life and rhetoric of radical leftist agitator Lucy Parsons with the intention of providing a healthier understanding of the complicated world of racial identity politics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While wider society—and even her death certificate—labeled her “Negro,” she was conversely accustomed to the concoction of nineteenth century Texas’ more complicated caste system that took into account all possible ethnic equations. Coming from a birthplace where she might have considered herself anything from Mestizo to Mulatto or any other of the dozens of categories utilized at the time, she was not culturally prepared for wider society’s monoracial designation of Black, and therefore scoffed at its validity.

In hindsight, onlookers often accuse Lucy Parsons of negating her African heritage for a seemingly more desirable ethnic identity. There is a sense, especially within the modern African American community, that a person of color self-labeling anything other than exclusively Black is virtually treasonous and committing a form of identity denial and self-hate. Criticism of notable individuals such as Barack Obama, Tiger Woods and others exemplify this sentiment of betrayal. In actuality, Lucy Parsons seemed to be holistically embracing her complete ethnic heritage, not merely a fraction of it. Therefore, the question must ultimately be posed as to how the legacy of those early externally defined racial and ethnic designations can provide a better consideration of multiracial designations in contemporary times…

Read the entire paper here.

Mixing Up the Game: Social and Historical Contours of Black Mixed Heritage Players in British Football

Mark Christian, Professor & Chair of African & African American Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

pages 131-144

in the volume Race, Ethnicity and Football: Persisting Debates and Emergent Issues
Routledge
2011-03-29
288 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-88205-7

Edited by:

Daniel Burdsey, Senior Lecturer of Sociology
Chelsea School of Sport
University of Brighton

INTRODUCTION

As the world comes to terms with the reality that the most powerful man on earth, President Barack Obama, is of African-American (mixed heritage) background, it is evident that multiracial heritage has become a popular subject matter. Yet much of this interest stems from the fact that history has been made in terms of a person of colour holding court in the most powerful office in the world. That stated, the social world of mixed heritage persons continues to be one of mixed fortunes. In relation to football, however, there is little doubt that the emergence of players of mixed heritage is palpable in the English Premier League and England team set-up.

This chapter primarily focuses on the socio-historical experiences of black mixed heritage’ footballers within the context of British society. What qualifies me to write on such a subject as black mixed heritage footballers in the UK context? In the world of social science, my social background and academic training would probably be deemed “organically connected” to the phenomena under scrutiny. Indeed having been raised in the city of Liverpool in the 1970s and 1980s, I am acutely aware of both British football and institutional racism. Moreover, my black British heritage and intellectual interests have intersected with my love for the beautiful game and the experience of black British players in general.

Additionally, I played for over a decade in the amateur football scene in Liverpool during the 1980s in predominantly black mixed heritage teams based in Toxteth/Liverpool 8, winning league titles and cups on a regular basis. During the 1980s, both of the city’s professional clubs, Everton and Liverpool, had very successful teams, yet it was rare to see a black face on the pitch or on the terraces. Racialised relations were rather poor, and it was difficult for local blacks in the city to go beyond the boundaries of Toxteth/Liverpool 8, where the majority resided, without incurring physical threats to one’s life. Moreover, the city council also had an appalling record of discrimination in employment against its local black population (Gifford et al. 1989).

Most importantly, beyond the structures of institutional racism in Liverpool, I know what it is like to be called a “black bastard” while playing a game of football. Indeed, racism was rife in amateur football on the pitch and in the professional game on the terraces. I recall John Barnes making his England debut in 1983, and later the chants of the England supporters: “there ain’t no black in the Union Jack, Johnnie Barnes, Johnnie Barnes”—a chant that would lead the academic Paul Gilroy (1987) to coin the phrase for his bestseller There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack…

…HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF BRITISH MIXED-NESS

Britain has a long history of amnesia in what could be deemed a “racialised mongrelisation” memory loss. After all, it is a state that has historically “mixed” with many cultural groups. To be sure, since the earliest times of British history, peoples with varied ethnic backgrounds, beliefs, languages and cultures have settled in Britain; from the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages (5000 BC-100 BC) to the Roman Britain era (55 BC-410 AD). Briefly, the Picts, Celts, Romans, Saxons, Angles, Danes, Jutes, Vikings and Normans are key historical cultural groups that led to the “normative” white ethnic category now described homogenously as “white” and singular in authoritative government census surveys…

Read the entire chapter (by permission of the author) here.

More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order

Temple University Press
December 2001
280 pages
7×10; 1 figure
Paperback: EAN: 978-1-56639-909-8, ISBN: 1-56639-909-2

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California at Santa Barbara

In the United States, anyone with even a trace of African American ancestry has been considered black. Even as the twenty-first century opens, a racial hierarchy still prevents people of color, including individuals of mixed race, from enjoying the same privileges as Euro-Americans. In this book, G. Reginald Daniel argues that we are at a cross-roads, with members of a new multiracial movement pointing the way toward equality.

Tracing the centuries-long evolution of Eurocentrism, a concept geared to protecting white racial purity and social privilege, Daniel shows how race has been constructed and regulated in the United States.  The so-called one-drop rule (i.e., hypodescent) obligated individuals to identify as black or white, in effect erasing mixed-race individuals from the social landscape. For most of our history, many mixed-race individuals of African American descent have attempted to acquire the socioeconomic benefits of being white by forming separate enclaves or “passing.”  By the 1990s, however, interracial marriages became increasingly common, and multiracial individuals became increasingly political, demanding institutional changes that would recognize the reality of multiple racial backgrounds and challenging white racial privilege.

More Than Black? regards the crumbling of the old racial order as an opportunity for substantially more than an improvement in U.S. race relations; it offers no less than a radical transformation of the nation’s racial consciousness and the practice of democracy.

Read the introduction here.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
  • Part I: White Over Black
  • 1. Eurocentrism: The Origin of the Master Racial Project
  • 2. Either Black or White: The United State and the Binary Racial Project
• Part II: Black No More
  • 3. White by Definition: Multiracial Identity and the Binary Racial Project
  • 4. Black by Law: Multiracial Identity and the Ternary Racial Project
• Part III: More than Black
  • 5. The New Multiracial Identity: Both Black and White
  • 6. The New Multiracial Identity: Neither Black nor White
  • 7. Black by Popular Demand: Multiracial Identity and the Decennial Census
• Part IV: Black No More or More than Black?
  • 8. The Illusion of Inclusion : From White Domination to White Hegemony
  • 9. The New Millennium: Toward a New Master Racial Project
• Epilogue: Beyond Black or White: A New United States Racial Project
• Notes
• Index

DNA unlocks family secrets of the Chinese juggler, the enigmatic sea-captain and more

The Globe and Mail
Toronto, Canada
2013-03-23

Carolyn Abraham, Special to The Globe and Mail

The birth of my first child made me see the past through a new lens: how it’s never lost, not completely; we carry it with us, in us, and we look for it in our parents and in our children, to give us our bearings and ground us in the continuity of life. And the past accommodates. It shows off in dazzling, unpredictable ways – a familiar gait, a gesture, the timbre of a voice, a blot of colour along the tailbone. The body has a long memory indeed.

The mysteries of the past lure many to the maw of genealogy – hours, years and small fortunes devoured tracing the branches of family trees. I had never been one of those people, but now a tempting shortcut had appeared: genetic tests that promised to reveal histories never told or recorded anywhere else.

Written in the quirky tongue of DNA and wound into the nucleus of nearly every human cell are biological mementos of the family who came before us.

And science is finding ways to dig them out, rummaging through our genetic code as if it were a trunk in the attic.

When questions of identity had been with me for so long; when my children might grow up with the same questions; and my parents, with everything they know and all the secrets hiding in their living cells, could vanish in a breath – why would I wait? I imagined the cool blade of science cutting to the truth of us, after more than a century of speculation and denial.

I started asking questions about my family in the late 1970s, after people started asking them of me. I had just turned 7 and we had moved from the Toronto area to the Southern Ontario town of St. Catharines.

Our tidy subdivision must have sprung up in the space age of the 1960s: There was a Star Circle and Venus and Saturn Courts, and in our roundabout of mostly German families, we were the aliens at 43 Neptune Dr. Before we moved in, the Pontellos had been the most exotic clan.

The kids my age would pretend to be detectives investigating versions of crimes we’d seen on Charlie’s Angels. All the girls wanted to play the blond, bodacious Farrah Fawcett character, and when arguments broke out over whether my dark looks should exclude me from eligibility, an interrogation usually followed.

“So where you from, anyway?” one of the kids would ask.

“Mississauga,” I’d say.

“No, really, where are you from?”

“Well, I was born in England – ”

“No, I mean, like, what are you?”

Kids can be mean, but my friends weren’t. Most of them were just curious about a brown girl with a Jewish last name who went to the Catholic school. I was curious too. I wanted to say Italian, like the Pontellos. I wanted freckles and hair that swung like Dorothy Hamill’s. But more than that, I wanted an answer.

“Just tell them you’re English,” Mum would say. “You were born in England.”

“But I don’t look English.”

“Tell them you’re Eurasian,” my father would offer.

“Where’s Eurasia?”…

Read the entire article here.

‘It is a peculiar feeling, this multiple-consciousness:’ Putting the Multiracial Experience Into Multicultural Education

McNair Scholars Research Journal
Eastern Michigan University
Volume 4, Issue 1 (2012-01-26)
Article 2
21 pages

Jennifer Alexander

Alexis is the product of miscegenation. Her mother is White and her father is Black. Her appearance blends both races so that, at a glance, she might be described as light brown with slim, European facial features. Growing up, Alexis faced many stereotypical situations mixed-race individuals face. She was constantly asked, “What are you?” and told she looked exotic. When others tried to guess her racial makeup, she was called Hispanic, Arabic, or Filipino, rarely ever identified with her correct racial ancestry. Even though Alexis may not be a living person, her experience is one to which many mixed-race individuals can relate.

The year 2000 marked a milestone for the mixed-race population in the United States. This was the first year any person of mixed race was allowed to identify as such on the U.S. Census. As a result, the population of non-Hispanic, multiracial persons jumped from 0 in 1990 to 4,602,146 in 2000 (“Population by race,” 2000). Where did all these people of mixed race come from? The simple answer: they were always here.

Despite persons of mixed-race existing well before 2000, research on this portion of the United States’ population is lacking. This literature review begins to connect mixed-race history and theory to educational theory and practice. The purpose of this connection is to examine the mixed-race experience in multicultural education and why it is underreported in current research. Bridging the gap between multiracial experiences and multicultural education might possibly make education more inclusive, not just for mixed-race students but for all students, because it will bring to the forefront similarities and differences that students, parents, and teachers should understand.

Race permeates American culture, acting as a “fundamental organizing principle of human affairs” (Spickard, 1992, p. 12). It is most often associated with individual physique, such as skin tone and facial features, as a form of biology. However, Wardle and Cruz-Janzen (2004) distinguish between genotype, “the genetic code each person carries in his or her chromosomes”, and phenotype, “the physical characteristics an individual displays” (p. 28). They acknowledge the general public belief that individuals with the same genotype carry the same phenotype, and, yet, argue this is not fact. Harrison (2010) shares a statement on race from the American Anthropological Association: “Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic “racial” groups differ from one another only in about 6%” (p. 23). To use another example, this understanding of genetics among races is analogous to comparing granulated sugar, table salt, and corn syrup. While granulated sugar may look like table salt, chemically it has more in common with corn syrup. This analogy begins to break down the argument of race as biology.

Some scholars view race as a social construct (Spickard, 1992; Harrison, 2010). As a social construct, race becomes a way to maintain boundaries (Spickard, 2010), commonly referred to as the color line. Wardle and Cruz-Janzen (2004) claim that “maintaining the color line truly translates to maintaining the power line” (p. 97). Power, especially in the United States, feeds the stratification system that creates racial group division, placing Whites at the top. As a result, oppressed racial groups “fight for numbers” to “fight against the institutional structure designed to perpetuate their dehumanization and oppression,” in addition to fighting against other oppressed racial groups for “limited resources” (p. 98).

Further support viewing race as a social construct is the “flexibility” of race. Views on race have changed throughout history. Race has “been defined and used in different ways by different cultures in different time periods” (Harrison, 2010, p. 21). However, if race is to be seen as a biological occurrence, the understanding of it should follow suit. The fact that the understanding of race varies between groups and over time leads me to define it as a social construct.

Additionally, the concepts of monoracial and mixed race need to be defined. In our common understanding of race, an individual is identified by a single racial category. These categories include Caucasian, African American, Native American, Asian-Pacific Islander, Arab and Hispanic/Latino. When introducing persons who represent a mix of any of these labels, a distinction must be made between those persons, and individuals who are represented by only one group. Therefore, a monoracial individual has parents who fall into the same socially-constructed racial group, while a mixed-race individual has parents who fall into two or more racial groups.

To begin to understand how race, and specifically mixed-race individuals, fit into educational studies, the changes that mixed-race categorization has gone through must also be examined. Just as Harrison believes, racial categorization is not a stagnant concept, and this rings true for descriptions of mixed-race individuals.

Read the entire article here.

Picturing Black New Orleans: A Creole Photographer’s View of the Early Twentieth Century

University Press of Florida
2012-09-02
152 pages
7×10
Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-4187-2

Arthé A. Anthony, Professor of American Studies, Emeritus
Occidental College, Los Angeles, California

Florestine Perrault Collins (1895-1988) lived a fascinating and singular life. She came from a Creole family that had known privileges before the Civil War, privileges that largely disappeared in the Jim Crow South. She learned photographic techniques while passing for white. She opened her first studio in her home, and later moved her business to New Orleans’s black business district. Fiercely independent, she ignored convention by moving out of her parents’ house before marriage and, later, by divorcing her first husband.

Between 1920 and 1949, Collins documented African American life, capturing images of graduations, communions, and recitals, and allowing her subjects to help craft their images. She supported herself and her family throughout the Great Depression and in the process created an enduring pictorial record of her particular time and place. Collins left behind a visual legacy that taps into the social and cultural history of New Orleans and the South.

It is this legacy that Arthé Anthony, Collins’s great-niece, explores in Picturing Black New Orleans. Anthony blends Collins’s story with those of the individuals she photographed, documenting the profound changes in the lives of Louisiana Creoles and African Americans. Balancing art, social theory, and history and drawing from family records, oral histories, and photographs rescued from New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Anthony gives us a rich look at the cultural landscape of New Orleans nearly a century ago.

The Chowan Discovery Group: Documenting the Mixed-Race History of North Carolina’s “Winton Triangle”

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners
2013-03-20

Vikki Bynum, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Here’s another region of the South with a fascinating history of mixed-race ancestry. I discovered the Chowan Discovery Group after Steven Riley, creator and moderator of MixedRaceStudies.org, introduced me via email to the Group’s Executive Director, Marvin T. Jones. The “Winton Triangle,” located in Hertford County, North Carolina, encompasses the three towns of Winton, Cofield, and Ahoskie. Here, people maintain a distinctive identity rooted in Native American, European, and African ancestry.

According to Marvin Jones, the Triangle traces its origins to before the 1584 arrival of the English to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where Chowanoke (Choanoac) Indian settlements were prominent along the Chowan River. After the English invasion, diseases (to which Native Americans lacked immunity) and territorial disputes decimated and disrupted the Chowanoke settlements of present-day Hertford County…

Read the entire article here.

How the Africans Became Black

The Atlantic
2012-12-13

Wayétu Moore

A Liberian-American reflects on the experiences of Africans who have moved to the United States, a growing community that accounts for 3 percent of the U.S.’s foreign-born population.

After leaving my nine-to-five job, I was led to a New York Immigration Coalition job posting. While waiting in the coalition’s lobby for an interview, a copy of a popular TIME Magazine cover caught my eye. “WE ARE AMERICANS,” the cover read. The photo on the cover featured faces of various brown and yellow immigrants, eager and hopeful, representing both the spirit of America’s revolutionary history and its inevitable future. I was remembering my own family’s immigration when I stopped to wonder: Where are the Africans?

U.S. immigration debates are overwhelmingly centered on immigrants from Latin America. Proportionately, Mexicans and central Americans far outnumber other immigrant groups in the United States. According to a Migration Policy Institute study, since 1970, “a period during which the overall U.S. immigration population increased four-fold, the Mexican and central American population increased by a factor of 20.” In a subsequent study on black immigration, the same organization reported that black African immigrants account for 3 percent of the total U.S. foreign-born population.

Like their Latin American counterparts, African immigrants keep a low profile in an effort to avoid humiliation, deportation, and loss of work. Many of them, whether accidentally or otherwise, wind up blending in with African-American culture. But however closely they may identify with black America, they, too, are immigrants…

…In order to stand out from blacks economically, Irish immigrants had to monopolize their low-wage jobs and keep free Northern blacks from joining unions during the labor movement. And in order to disassociate socially, they had to consent to active participation in the oppression of the black race, embracing whiteness and the system that disenfranchised and justified an ungovernable hatred toward African-Americans.

Ignatiev includes an 1843 letter from Daniel O’Connell: “Over the broad Atlantic I pour forth my voice, saying, come out of such land, you Irishmen; or, if you remain, and dare countenance the system of slavery that is supported there, we will recognize you as Irishmen no longer.”

The color of their skin saved them, but has also nearly obliterated a once vibrant cultural identity so that today I know no Irishmen. I have friends of Irish descent, former coworkers who mentioned the occasional Irish grandfather or associates who gesture toward familiarity of the lost heritage over empty pints on St. Patrick’s Day — but the Irishmen are now white, and the Irishmen are now gone…

Read the entire article here.