Mixed Race Studies

I’m Biracial—Not Black: Brooklyn Savvy Takes on Race

Brooklyn Savvy
NYC Life, NYC-TV
2010-12-27

Toni Williams, Host and Co-Executive Producer

Brooklyn Savvy takes on the complex topic of being “Biracial in America” with Juliette Fairley, actress and playwright of the “Mulatto Saga.” Join this riveting, candid discussion of Juliette’s journey as she discovers, and grapples with her mixed race identity. We discuss the changing social construct and President Barack Obama’s impact on the socio-political landscape for biracial people in America. The Savvy panel takes a hard look at what has changed.
 
And, a special note to our viewers, please let us know what you think of the show-this is not ordinary television. Join Host Toni Williams, and panelists, Karen Auster, Lisa Bing and Ellen Salpeter as we deal with an issue that is seldom discussed with this degree of authenticity!

Obama’s Presidential (Mixed) Race: Framing and Ideological Analysis of Blogs and News

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
July 2011
217 pages

Iliana P. Rucker

DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Communication

The election of Barack Obama as President of the United States brought a heightened awareness to the role of race and produced speculation about the idealized notion of the achievement of a post-racial United States.

This dissertation examined mediated conversations on mixed race identity in response to some of the significant events in the Obama campaign and the first months of the Obama presidency. Specifically, this study examined the ways that newspapers and blogs construct discourses about race, mixed race, and racism. Further, I explored the biological, legal, and social implications as they relate to current constructions of mixed race identity. This dissertation centered the data collection around four pivotal discourses in the Obama era: (1) Obama’s announcement of his presidential candidacy; (2) Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech; (3) Obama’s election to the presidency; and (4) the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Gates. The parameters of these pivotal discourses allowed me to focus on what bloggers say about the events and how the newspapers reported them. Ideological criticism and framing analysis guided my study on racial identifications and negotiations related to Obama from three newspapers: New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Sun-Times; as well as four blogs: Mixed Roots, Beige-World, Light-skinned-ed Girl, and Twisted Curlz.

Three dominant frames emerged from the news coverage on the four discursive moments: race, dialogue, and history. I define the race frame as stories about the issues concerning race and racism; the dialogue frame as stories about a conversation, specifically at the national level; and the historical frame as stories about historic events. Three frames also emerged from the framing analysis of the blog posts: awareness, personalization, and racism. The awareness frame consists of postings about news and celebrity in mixed race community; the personalization frame as personal postings; and the racism frame as postings relating to issues concerning racism.

Ideological criticism facilitated the analysis of the news articles and blogs and allowed me to uncover several ideologies about race and mixed race emerge from these discursive constructions. The newspapers perpetuated the invisibility of Whiteness, the Black and White binary, hybrid heroism, and the erasure of racism ideologies. The preference for Obama as President, the salience of mixed race matters, and promotion of anti-racist work are ideologies in the blogs. While the blogs and news articles are different in format, style and purpose, taken together they give a look at the ongoing conversation that impacts discourses on race, racism, and mixed race. The interpretation of the findings explains how the media I examined reveal the social construction of race, the rhetoric of race, and agenda setting in each of the discursive moments in order to discuss current conceptualizations of race in the United States. In addition to an in-depth interpretation of framing and ideological analyses findings, the theoretical and methodological contributions are discussed.

Table of Contents

• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
  • Personal Perspective
    • Researcher Perspective
    • Rationale
    • Data Collection and Analysis
      • News Media
      • Weblogs
    • Obama, Race, and Identity
      • Four Pivotal Moments in Discourses on Mixed Race
    • Assumptions
    • Research Questions
  • Key Concepts
    • Mixed Race Identity
    • Post-Racial United States
    • Media Conversations
  • Overview
• CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
  • Racial Identity
  • Biological Assumptions
    • One-drop rule
  • Legal Assumptions
    • Social Implications
  • Socially Constructing Race
    • Media Framing
    • Rhetorical and Ideological Framing
    • Rhetoric of Race
    • Terministic screens
      • Mixed Race and Media Representations
• CHAPTER 3: METHODS
  • Discursive Moments
  • Data Collection
  • Research Questions
  • Methods
    • Ideological analysis
    • Locating myself in the research
• CHAPTER 4: FRAMING ANALYSIS
  • Framing Analysis
    • Defining Frames
  • Framing Analysis of Newspapers
    • Race Frame
      • Racialized Obama script
      • Race is biological
      • Progressing past racism script
    • Dialogue Frame
      • National script
      • Debate script
    • History Frame
      • From the past script
      • Witnessing history script
  • Framing Analysis of Blog Posts
    • Awareness Frame
      • Mixed Race News script
      • Celebrity script
      • Questions script
    • Personalization Frame
      • Positionality
      • 2008 election experience
    • Racism Frame
      • Racial divide
      • Racial hatred
      • Challenging stereotyping and racial profiling script
• CHAPTER 5: IDEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS
  • Defining Ideology
  • Ideological Analysis of News Discourse
    • Invisibility of Whiteness
    • Black and White Binary
    • Hybrid Heroism
    • Erasing Racism
  • Ideological Analysis of Blog Discourse
    • Obama for President
      • Defending Barack Obama
      • Acceptance
      • Obama is mixed
    • Anti-Racist Work
• CHAPTER 6: INTERPRETATION
  • Social Construction of Race
    • Rhetoric of race
  • Agenda Setting
  • Four Pivotal Moments in Discourses on Mixed Race
  • Conclusion
• CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION
  • Findings
    • RQ1: How do pivotal discourses during Obama’s campaign and early presidency stimulate conversations about race, mixed race identity, racism?
      • RQ1a: How do newspapers frame race and mixed race identity?
      • RQ1b: How do blogs frame race, mixed race, and racism?
    • RQ2: What ideologies about race, racism, and mixed race emerge from newspapers and blogs?
      • Newspapers
      • Blogs
    • RQ3: How do media discourses contribute to constructions of race?
    • RQ4: In what ways do the constructions suggest the possibility of a post-racial United States?
    • RQ5: How do newspapers and blogs set agendas that reinforce and oppose each other?
  • Contributions
    • Contributions to theory
    • Contributions to method
  • Future Research
  • Final Thoughts
  • References

Read the entire dissertation here.

Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Fourth Edition)

Westview Press
July 2011
400 pages
Trade paperback ISBN: 9780813345543

Audrey Smedley, Professor Emerita of Anthropology and African American Studies
Virginia Commonwealth University

Brian D. Smedley, Vice President and Director
Health Policy Institute
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies

In a sweeping work that traces the idea of race for more than three centuries, Audrey Smedley shows that “race” is a cultural invention that has been used variously and opportunistically since the eighteenth century. Race, in its origin, was not a product of science but of a folk ideology reflecting a new form of social stratification and a rationalization for inequality among the peoples of North America.

New coauthor Brian Smedley joins Audrey Smedley in updating this renowned and groundbreaking text. The fourth edition includes a compelling new chapter on the health impacts of the racial worldview, as well as a thoroughly rewritten chapter that explores the election of Barack Obama and the evolving role of race in American political history. This edition also incorporates recent findings on the human genome and the implications of genomics. Drawing on new understandings of DNA expression, the authors scrutinize the positions of contemporary race scientists who maintain that race is a valid biological concept.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Some Theoretical Considerations
• 2. Etymology of the Term “Race”
• 3. Antecedents of the Racial Worldview
• 4. The Growth of the English Ideology about Human Differences in America
• 5. The Arrival of Africans and Descent into Slavery
• 6. Comparing Slave Systems: The Significance of “Racial” Servitude
• 7. Eighteenth-Century Thought and Crystallization of the Ideology of Race
• 8. Antislavery and the Entrenchment of a Racial Worldview
• 9. The Rise of Science and Scientific Racism
• 10. Growth of The Racial Worldview in 19th Century Science
• 11. Science and the Expansion of Race Ideology Beyond the US
• 12. Twentieth-Century Developments in Race Ideology
• 13. Changing Perspectives on Human Variation in Science
• 14. Dismantling the Folk Idea of Race: The Election of Barack Obama and the Transformations of an Ideology
• 15. The Health Consequences of the Racial Worldview
• References
• Index

What race do you identify Obama as? Does President Obama’s race effect your opinion of him?

SOC 119 – Voices from the Classroom
World in Conversation Project
Pennsylvania State University
2011-09-08

The first of 138+ student comments…

1. Personally President Obama’s race does not affect my opinion of him at all. When viewing Obama I consider him black, even though he is multiracial. Part of the reason I consider Obama to be black is because he looks black, and also when he was elected President there was pandemonium and celebration because he was seen as the first black President of the United States. I could not vote in the 2008 election because I was not old enough, but if I was Obama’s race would not have swayed my vote one way or the other in considering a candidate for election…
2. I consider Presiden Obama as multi racial because he is in fact half black and half white. I dont think it matters what race President Obama is. I think he should be respected as our Commander in Chief no matter what race or religion he is…
3. Our President, Barack Obama, is black. I have absolutely no opinion about what race my President is or any other important figure for that matter. Different people have different opinions about what President Obama is and if he is American and all of this nonsense but he is an American. He is an American that I consider to be black based on how I categorize people. Others may not agree with how I categorize who he is but that is how I go about business. I consider myself to be white and someone can disagree but I am still going to think I am white. My outlook on what someone is, is straight forward and I do not pass judgment based on what someone looks like besides that that person is what they are. As a result, Mr. Obama is black…
4. I identify Obama as a mixed race; he is not one hundred percent black, nor is he one hundred percent white. Obviously, his skin is darker than any other president we have had, but I don’t believe that this should be his sole identifier, nor should it be the only thing he is to be remembered for. He was raised by a white mother and is most definitely from a mixed background. Unfortunately, skin color is the first thing people see, and that is what sticks in people’s minds…
5. I am sure that almost everyone who had one glance at Obama would immediately classify him as Black, even though he is actually multiracial. Even so, his race did not change my opinion of him negatively, but rather positively I must say before and after I learned from class that he is multiracial…
6. What race do I identify Obama as and does Obama’s race effect my opinion of him? Previously to today’s sociology discussion, I thought that Barack Obama was black. I think I thought this because when he first ran for presidency, everyone made a huge deal that he would be the first black president in the United States. Clearly, I was wrong and learned that he is biracial. His Mother is a White American and his father is a Black Kenyan…
7. Despite what most people may say, President Barack Obama is multi-racial. He is only fifty percent black despite the fact that people refer to him as our “black president,” while the rest of his makeup includes white and possibly even Native American…
8. Although I do not know much about Obama’s background, just by looking at him I would classify him as a black person. I think that it was a phenomenal thing when a black man was elected as the president of the United States of America because it showed just how far we had come as a society. We had become one step closer to true racial equality…
9. First and foremost, I identify President Barack Obama as being a mixed race. Obama is English, Irish, and Kenyan. To me, that does not make him black, that makes him mixed. People were so hyped up with the fact that he is part black that I feel they chose to ignore the rest of his background. I can imagine this made some people upset…
10. I personally think that it is awesome that Obama is black. When I first heard that a black man was running for president, I was younger and pretty ignorant. I didn’t think he had a chance at winning at all. I figured most of America was more ignorant than I and that they were all republicans and/or racist. Clearly, I was extremely wrong…
11. Barrack Obama is the nation’s first black president. Most everybody I know categorizes Barrack Obama as a black man, as do I. If you were to ask me if Barrack Obama is black, I would say yes. But if you asked me what race Barrack Obama is, I would say multi-racial like I did on the clicker question asked in class…
12. I would consider President Obama to be multiracial, his father was black and his mother was white. But, does this affect my opinion of him? To say the honest truth, I absolutely do not have any knowledge in politics or government. I am not registered to vote, nor do I think I should have the right to vote knowing my lack of knowledge on the subject…
13. I view President Obama as multiracial although when he first started running for president I saw him as black because of all the hype of him possibly being the first black President of the United States. I personally think the debates that occurred about his race and religion got way out of hand during the election and often took the focus away from actual issues. For me personally it does not affect my opinion of him…
14. I personally identify Obama as a mixed individual. It is clearly seen that he is a man of mixed origins. It is also very apparent that he has some Black in him. Now to get into the total percents I don’t know what fraction of his blood is Black, Asian, etc. but the fact still remains that he has Black blood in him. To say that he is black is not totally wrong either…
15. Let me start off by saying that I consider Barack Obama to be a black man for the sheer fact that he seemed to identify with the black community throughout his campaign. I also understand that when you could possibly be the first black president in American history you do not want to ruin the hopes of millions of minorities by denying your heritage because you are multi-racial and not a fully black man. But since he does consider himself a black man and not multi-racial I have different feelings towards him than other white candidates…
16. I dont care at all that Obama is black or part Asian or whatever he is. To me he is black and that is just fine. I dont follow politics much but it’s hard to do worse than Bush. Obama inherited a shitty economy and I dont blame him at all for that. He did manage to catch Osama Bin Laden after Bush failed for however many years. That was pretty badass. He’s just a likable, intelligent, pretty good looking guy. The fact that he’s black doesnt do anything to detract from that…
17. When I first look at someone, I identify them by the color of their skin. Without talking to someone and finding out how he or she identifies him/herself, that’s all I can go by. With that idea in mind, I identify Barack Obama as a black male because his skin is clearly darker than mine and other white people. That does not affect my views, though…
18. Barack Obama’s father is from Africa and his mother is white. So I guess I would consider him biracial but I mostly view him as a black man. It is the easiest to identify him with because he is a man of color. To be honest his race does not alter my opinion of him but it does scare me. It makes me afraid for him, for me and for blacks in general. There is a ton of pressure on anybody who decides to become the president of the United States. Him being the first black president brings added pressure because he is the first of his kind to be in such a high position of power. This is a double edged sword because though he is in the position to knock down barriers and give more people of color the opportunity to become president he is also in position to give white America a reason to not vote for another candidate of color…

Read all of the other comments here.

Obama’s ascent to the (still) White House is part and parcel of forty years of transition from the Jim Crow order to a new racial regime. Obama represents the sedimentation of a higher stage of the “new racism,” one described by Dylan E. Rodríguez as a “multiracial white supremacy.” In the new phase of racial regulation, the old sins—imperialism, neoliberal capitalism, and the racial order—work best in blackface.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Chats: Is Obama Black, Bi-racial, or Post-racial?” Zócalo Public Square, September 7, 2011. http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/09/07/is-obama-black-bi-racial-or-post-racial/read/chats/

I say let him [Barack Obama] do his best to run the country, like any President, and the rest of us can do him a favor by not constantly debating how black he is or isn’t. Enough already. He’s the President, for Christ’s sake. Let him do his job.

David A. Hollinger, “Chats: Is Obama Black, Bi-racial, or Post-racial?” Zócalo Public Square, September 7, 2011. http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/09/07/is-obama-black-bi-racial-or-post-racial/read/chats/

Whoa, We Have a Black President

Zócalo: Public Square
2011-09-08

Randall Kennedy Assesses Obama’s Triumphs—and Shortcomings—In Erasing the Color Line

Randall Kennedy, Harvard professor of law and author of The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, had an assignment: to answer whether or not Obama has been erasing the color line. “By color line,” explained Kennedy, “I mean all of the sentiments, instincts, habits of mind, structures that wrongly stymie people because of race. Is Obama erasing that baleful aspect of political culture?”
 
In a word, said Kennedy, yes. But there was a caveat: the “Obama way” is to avoiding talking about race at every turn.
 
According to Kennedy, Obama’s most impressive feat was to treat making it to the White House as a realistic, tenable option. His legacy, Kennedy believes, will be the alteration of public psychology to a place of normalizing a black presidency. After four years, people will have accepted seeing a black man enter and exit Air Force One.
 
“It was so audacious because of the history of the U.S.,” he said.
 
As Kennedy reminded the audience, a crowd of a few hundred gathered in an auditorium in the Hammer Museum, African-Americans were largely excluded from politics until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. “Blacks were excluded by dint of terror throughout the deep South, excluded by dint of various legal shenanigans,” Kennedy said….

…Kennedy’s own criticisms of Obama only came up in the question-and-answer portion of the evening. Kennedy said he believes that Obama didn’t actively do enough to change the ideological landscape of the country and that he was sheepish about outwardly supporting liberal judges. Kennedy was most critical of Obama’s stances surrounding gay rights, finding it ironic that when Obama’s parents married across racial boundaries it was considered a felony in many places. Now Obama is pushing a “separate but equal” equivalent in the gay community…

Read the entire article here.
Watch the video and/or listen to the audio here.

Are you white enough?

Salon.com
2008-11-10

Laura Miller, Senior Writer

From Jim Crow laws to workplace discrimination, the history of race and the American courtroom is incendiary.

Come January, Barack Obama will be sworn in as either the first black president of the United States or the 44th white one, or both, or neither, depending on how you interpret his race. Race is such a monumental force in American culture and politics that the idea that it has to be interpreted may strike many people as bizarre. Of course Obama is black, some might argue, judging by his appearance, or by his self-identification as an African-American or even by his marriage and important relationships with other African-Americans. Yet more than one commentator has complained that he isn’t “black enough,” by which they may mean that his complexion isn’t dark enough, or that he was raised by whites, or that his African father provided him with no heritage in North American slavery, or that he doesn’t sufficiently align himself with the policies of a certain portion of African-American political leadership.

The problem with race as Americans understand it is that it doesn’t really exist. It is a brutal fact of life for millions of citizens, and an inescapable problem for the rest, but it is also, as Ariela J. Gross writes in her densely researched “What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America,” a “moving target,” whose definition and meaning is always in flux. Many of us can avoid encountering this strange truth in the imprecise realms of cultural and social life, but when it comes to the law, imprecision just doesn’t cut it. Gross’ book, a history of cases in which people have challenged their official racial designation, eloquently demonstrates just how difficult it can be to say what race—mine, yours, anybody’s—actually consists of…

Read the entire article here.

Up Front: Brent Staples

Sunday Book Review
The New York Times
2011-09-02

The Editors

Brent Staples, who reviews Randall Kennedy’s “Persist­ence of the Color Line” in this issue, is working on a history of mixed-race identity in the United States. “One of the things that interested me in the last campaign,” Staples wrote in an e-mail, “was the byplay having to do with Obama’s racial origins. It struck me that the press and the public generally reserve the ‘mixed race’ label for the offspring of racially mixed marriages. But there is a paradox here. Obama, half black and half white, is, genetically speaking, not much whiter than I am, even though my nearest white forebears were Virginia slave owners who lived and died in the 19th century. Similarly, there are people who think of themselves as black who are, genetically speaking, 70 percent white or more.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Too Black, Too White Presidency

The New York Times
2011-09-02

Brent Staples

Randall Kennedy, The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, New York: Pantheon Books, 2011. 322 pp.

The next time you see Barack Obama gliding into a White House press conference, take note of that jazzy walk. It is a dead ringer for the strut that was the bearing of choice among ­inner-city cool guys in the 1960s, when Barry Obama was still a tyke growing up in the exotic precincts of Hawaii and Indonesia. The Obama glide represents his embrace of a black aesthetic that was not his by circumstance of birth. It speaks on an intimate frequency to African-­American men, who have been smiling in recognition and rating it for style ever since he stepped into the national spotlight. President Obama is acutely aware of how to deploy the physical self to excellent effect. If we looked back closely at 2008, we would no doubt notice him amping up the glide for black audiences and dialing it back elsewhere…

…The messianic glow that surrounded Obama’s candidacy—Kennedy and others call it “Obamamania”—precluded closer scrutiny of his pronouncements, especially those having to do with race. The widely held notion that the now-famous race speech, “A More Perfect Union,” ranked with the Gettysburg Address or “I Have a Dream” strikes Kennedy as delusional. The speech, he writes, was little more than a carefully calibrated attempt to defuse the public relations crisis precipitated by the Wright affair. Far from frank, it understated the extent of the country’s racial divisions and sought to blame blacks and whites equally for them, when in fact, Kennedy writes, “black America and white America are not equally culpable. White America enslaved and Jim Crowed black America (not the other way around).” The speech was in keeping with the candidate’s wildly successful race strategy, which involved making white voters feel better about themselves whenever possible.

The cornerstone essay, “Obama Courts Black America,” is a breath of fresh air on many counts, not least of all because it offers a fully realized portrait of the black political opinion—left, right, center, high and low—that was brought to bear during the campaign. This is the most comprehensive document I’ve yet read on the near street fight that erupted over the question of how Obama should identify himself racially. There were those who viewed him as “too white” to be legitimately seen as black; those who had no problem with his origins; those who viewed the attempt to portray him as “mixed race” as a way of trying to “whiten” him for popular consumption; and those who accused Obama of throwing his white mother under the bus when it became clear that he regarded himself as African-American…

Read the entire article here.