Mixed Race Studies

Why Barack Obama Is Black: A Cognitive Account of Hypodescent

Psychological Science
Volume 22, Number 1 (January 2011)
pages 29-33
DOI: 10.1177/0956797610390383

Jamin Halberstadt, Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Otago

Steven J. Sherman, Chancellor’s Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Indiana University, Bloomington

Jeffrey W. Sherman, Professor of Psychology
University of California, Davis

We propose that hypodescent—the assignment of mixed-race individuals to a minority group—is an emergent feature of basic cognitive processes of learning and categorization. According to attention theory, minority groups are learned by attending to the features that distinguish them from previously learned majority groups. Selective attention creates a strong association between minority groups and their distinctive features, producing a tendency to see individuals who possess a mixture of majority- and minority-group traits as minority-group members. Two experiments on face categorization, using both naturally occurring and manipulated minority groups, support this view, suggesting that hypodescent need not be the product of racist or political motivations, but can be sufficiently explained by an individual’s learning history.

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Racial Identity’s Gray Area

The Wall Street Journal
2008-06-12

June Kronholz

The Definition of Whiteness Continues to Shift

When Barack Obama, whose mother was white, identifies himself as black, and when Bill Richardson, whose father was white, identifies himself as Hispanic, who is white?

The U.S. Census Bureau says the country will be majority-minority in 2050—that is, the combined number of blacks, Asians, American Indians and Hispanics will put whites in the minority. Texas and California are already there.

But the definition of white keeps shifting. Groups have been welcomed in or booted out; people opt out, sue to get in or change their minds and jump back and forth.

The deepest racial divide, between blacks and nonblacks, endures. But there also are identity shifts among African-Americans, as Sen. Obama’s success suggests. Some make it into the middle class, where education and social mobility may help shape their identities as much as race does. Others are left behind in increasingly segregated schools and neighborhoods.

The U.S. has never found it easy to assign race, although it certainly has tried. A century ago, the people who did the counting—demographers, sociologists, policy thinkers—divided whites into three strata. They considered Nordic whites, from England, Scandinavia and Germany, the most ethnically desirable and elite, followed by the Alpine whites, from eastern and central Europe, and finally the Mediterraneans. Everyone else was identified as black, red, yellow or brown, which included South Asians.

Whiteness and the privileges that came with it were so closely guarded that in 1912, a House committee held hearings on whether Italians were really Caucasian, says Thomas Guglielmo, a historian at George Washington University. The idea was picked up from Italy, where northern, lighter-skinned Italians, were asking the same questions about the southern, darker-skinned Italians, he says. No one argued seriously that Jews and Greeks, or Irish and Poles—light-skinned but poor—weren’t white, but whether they were ethnically Caucasian was up for debate, he adds…

…”Who’s white [won’t] mean that much, but when someone is partly black, that will still be noticed by a large part of society,” says Bill Butz of the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington research group. He sees today’s black-white divide becoming a “black/nonblack” gulf…

…Opting Out of Whiteness

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, there was “some sentiment” among non-Arabs for counting Arab-Americans as nonwhite, says David Roediger, a University of Illinois race historian. Since then, the Arab-American Institute in Washington has unsuccessfully lobbied the government for a separate “Middle East and North African” category on the census. The institute puts the Arab-American population at three times larger than the Census estimates, which limits its political power and claims on government programs…

…The Melting-Pot Effect

That doesn’t mean race won’t matter, even as it becomes harder to define. Blacks still cannot jump back and forth across those shifting racial lines, which explains why Sen. Obama calls himself black even while he singled out his white grandmother in his speech claiming the Democratic nomination.

That’s not likely to change soon. Some demographers predict that within a century, there will be as many Americans who are mixed-race as there will be those whose parents are both of the same race, further blurring color lines. But that “hybridity,” as demographers call it, will be concentrated among Hispanics and Asians who marry whites and each other, not among blacks…

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Rhetoric and Silence in Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father”

Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice
2009
46 pages
ISSN: 1097-3087

Barbara Clare Foley, Professor of English
Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey

When Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance first appeared in 1995, it was greeted with relatively modest sales but favorable reviews: critics welcomed a politician who actually possessed writerly skills. In the wake of Obama’s celebrated speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention and successful bid for the Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate, sales mounted, and a second edition appeared, this one containing the convention speech. In 2006, the audio book version, featuring the author as reader, won the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album. In 2007, a third edition was published, this time accompanied by an excerpt from Obama’s 2006 policy book, The Audacity of Hope. By July 2008, as the election neared, Obama’s autobiography had been on the best-seller list for 104 weeks. As of this writing in the summer of 2009, the book has sold millions of copies and been translated into eight different languages.

While Dreams from My Father has supplied some fodder for attacks by conservative pundits, it has for the most part inspired positive reviews, many of them bordering on hagiography. Toni Morrison praised Obama’s novelistic skill in “reflect[ing] on this extraordinary mesh of experiences that he has had.” Joe Klein, in Time, proclaimed that the book “may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.” On the eve of Obama’s inauguration, Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times critic, described Dreams from My Father as “the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography [ever] written by a future president.” Indicating the book’s popular appeal, the hundreds of reviews recorded on Amazon.com give the now-President’s autobiography an overall rating of 4½ stars. An informal web-based survey of college course syllabi suggests that, either excerpted or in its totality, Obama’s autobiography is being frequently assigned to college students. Dreams from My Father has proven to be an outstanding success in commercial, critical, and popular terms.

Arguably, however, it is precisely because the President’s literary star has ascended to such heights that his text warrants critical scrutiny. For success in the U.S. book market is in large part a measure not just of literary excellence or authorial prominence but also of a text’s embodiment of normative assumptions about society and self. In particular, a narrative of ascent—of which Dreams from My Father is a prime example—characteristically invokes dearly held myths about bootstraps individualism and social mobility, however poorly such notions may mesh with the realities of life in modern capitalist society. In this post-millennial moment, rife with anxieties domestic and international, economic and political, there is a particular yearning for tales about individuals who have passed over barriers and triumphed over hardships, thereby affirming the nation’s transcendence of its ugly racial past and entry into a present that is, if not “post-racial”—the current popular buzz-word—at least qualitatively more benign. To the extent that the identity quest embarked upon and achieved in Dreams from My Father can be taken to illustrate the integrity of not just its central actor, but the nation that has chosen him to be its leader, the text functions as Exhibit A in the case for American progress.

My principal goal in this essay—which is directed primarily to teachers of Obama’s text—is to examine the various rhetorical maneuvers that the author deploys in order to render maximally persuasive his odyssey to self-knowledge. I shall engage in a study not just of literary devices—which Obama handles with considerable skill—but of the ideology of form. This project will involve textual analysis on both the macro-level—the text’s apparatus of prefaces and postscripts, its tripartite division, the structuring of its individual units—and the micro-level—its narrative voice, methods of characterization, deployment of metaphor. To a significant extent, however, the effect of Dreams from My Father is contingent upon what the text does not say—the structured silences that allow it to minimize or, on occasion, exclude material that might impede its ideological work. In order to read the text fully, I shall as needed move outside it—not just to events and situations in Obama’s own life that are elided in his narrative, but also to events in the life of the mysterious father who inhabits the core of the narrative. Although readers may find most provocative the occlusions and obfuscations discussed in the final portion of this essay, they are urged to view these in the context of Obama’s overall rhetorical project, in which the said and the not-said are indissolubly linked…

…“A broader public debate”: Narrative frames

The teleological structure of Dreams from My Father can be described in various terms: a narrative of ascent and quest; a record of redemption, reinvention and rebirth; an odyssey from isolation to belonging, alienation to community. Obama’s story is distinctly gendered—unabashedly Oedipal in its focus on fathers and sons—and raced—it places front and center the identity dilemma of a young man of mixed descent coming to terms with the dualisms and hierarchies of a society obsessed with racial categorization. As Obama puts it in his 1995 Introduction, the text records “a boy’s search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American” (xvi). Dreams from My Father thus invokes such classic accounts of black male self-discovery as W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Malcolm X’s Autobiography, as well as various autobiographical and fictional writings of James Baldwin and Richard Wright—many of which are referenced, implicitly and explicitly in the course of Obama’s narrative. Where these earlier explorations of selfhood characteristically end in defeat or ambivalence, however, Obama’s journey—described throughout the text by means of a trope of voyaging, charting, and traveling the seas—ends in a triumphal homecoming. The text assures its readers that, although not without a few false starts that were soon corrected, its protagonist has moved from a child’s non-racial consciousness through an ambivalent Third Worldism to a confident blend of cosmopolitanism and American nationalism, bolstered by an ecumenical optimism that Obama loosely terms “faith.”…

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With Shades of Gray

Emory Magazine
Emory University
Spring 2009: Coda: A Changing Country

Reflections on the Inauguration of President Barack Obama

Taharee Jackson, ’10 PhD

The last thing I could afford to do was attend the presidential inauguration at the National Mall, but I simply couldn’t miss it. I had to go and represent my multiracial family. As a multiracial woman, I am seldom presented with the opportunity to see someone just like me in the public eye.

Tiger Woods has made multiraciality somewhat “cool,” yet people still have trouble identifying him in photos. That being said, to have the entire globe’s gaze finally affixed on a biracial person—on Barack Obama—compelled me to travel to Washington, D.C., to support him. He wouldn’t know I was there, but my family and I would . . . and it would mean the world to us.

…I braved subzero temperatures, no sleep, millions of people, closed train stations, and hours of no food or bathroom usage, not because I think of Obama as our first black president. True, I am part black, but so is he. He is part black. Barack Obama is half black and half white—he is biracial. To acknowledge one part of him—his blackness—is certainly not to deny his whiteness, unless we deny him the right to identify himself…

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Passing for Black?  Biracial Americans Are Increasingly ‘Passing for Black’

The Root
2010-12-14

Thomas Chatterton Williams

A new study posits that black-white biracial adults are increasingly choosing, like President Obama, to emphasize their blackness. But in this country, “black” has always been a mongrel affair.

It created a minor media frenzy last spring when President Barack Obama checked the “Black, African Am., or Negro” box on his census form and, as an item on The Root put it, “set the post-racial dream back 400 years.” Elizabeth Chang, a mother of (Asian-Caucasian) biracial daughters and an editor at the Washington Post, excoriated him on that paper’s op-ed page for failing to “celebrate” his biracial ancestry. And Michelle Hughes, president of the Chicago Biracial Family Network, voiced a complaint that many seemed to share when she observed that “the multiracial community feels a sense of disappointment that he refuses to identify with us.”

A new study in the December 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly, entitled “Passing as Black: Racial Identity Work Among Biracial Americans,” is likely to rekindle the debate by providing evidence that black-white biracial adults are increasingly choosing, like Obama, to emphasize their blackness and downplay their white ancestry. In what the study calls “a striking reverse pattern of passing,” a majority of respondents reported that they “pass” as black….

…Expressing pride in their blackness—that is a good thing, and the authors of the study use their data to make the case that this phenomenon of reverse passing demonstrates that blackness itself is less stigmatized today than in the past, which is certainly evidence of progress. However, what is troubling about the study is also what I find so disturbing about the criticism surrounding Obama’s census decision—namely, the flawed premise that in America, an opposition can exist between “biracial” and “black.”

“Today’s passing,” Nikki Khanna, a sociologist at the University of Vermont and the study’s lead author, says, “is about adopting an identity that contradicts your self-perception of race—and it tends to be contextual.” In other words, biracial blacks, who are themselves aware that they are not simply black but, rather, are something other, are making the conscious decision—at least in certain social situations—to project what must therefore be a less-than-authentic black identity.

But what the advocates for biracial self-identification, as well as the authors of this study, fail to grasp is precisely what I have always been so proud of Obama for recognizing and exemplifying: Blackness in America is by definition a mongrel affair. Biracial blacks do not have to “pass” as black; they just are black…

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‘One-drop rule’ persists: Biracials viewed as members of their lower-status parent group

Harvard Gazette
Harvard Science: Science and Engineering at Harvard University
2010-12-09

Steve Bradt, Harvard Staff Writer

Arnold K. Ho (right), a Ph.D. student in psychology at Harvard, and James Sidanius, a professor of psychology and of African and African-American studies at Harvard, researched the “one-drop rule.” They say their work reflects the cultural entrenchment of America’s traditional racial hierarchy, which assigns the highest status to whites, followed by Asians, with Latinos and blacks at the bottom.

The centuries-old “one-drop rule” assigning minority status to mixed-race individuals appears to live on in our modern-day perception and categorization of people like Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, and Halle Berry.

So say Harvard University psychologists, who’ve found that we still tend to see biracials not as equal members of both parent groups, but as belonging more to their minority parent group. The research appears in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“Many commentators have argued that the election of Barack Obama, and the increasing number of mixed-race people more broadly, will lead to a fundamental change in American race relations,” says lead author Arnold K. Ho, a Ph.D. student in psychology at Harvard. “Our work challenges the interpretation of our first biracial president, and the growing number of mixed-race people in general, as signaling a color-blind America.”…

…“One of the remarkable things about our research on hypodescent is what it tells us about the hierarchical nature of race relations in the United States,” says co-author James Sidanius, professor of psychology and of African and African-American studies at Harvard. “Hypodescent against blacks remains a relatively powerful force within American society.”…

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Obamafiction for Children: Imagining the Forty-Fourth U.S. President

Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
Volume 35, Number 4 (Winter 2010)
E-ISSN: 1553-1201 Print ISSN: 0885-0429
pages 334-356

Philip Nel, Professor of English
Kansas State University

In a column published five days after the 2008 election, journalist Jason Whitlock said of the president-elect’s life: “His is a tale that should be read aloud at bedtime in every American neighborhood.” It was already being read aloud in some neighborhoods. Even before Senator Obama had won the election, there were twelve juvenile titles about his life: two picture books, nine chapter books, and one comic book. From the election to the end of his first year in office, another forty-seven books were published: thirty-six more chapter books, seven more picture books, two comic books, one book of poetry, and one board book. And that doesn’t include the Obama Paper Dolls book, coloring and activity books, the titles about Bo the dog, nor the many books about Michelle, Sasha, and Malia.

To have this many children’s books about a candidate—or about a president so soon in his term of office—is unusual. During the campaign, Republican presidential candidate John McCain had seven titles to Obama’s twelve: five chapter books, one comic book, and one picture book (My Dad, John McCain, written by his daughter Meghan McCain). During George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, there were two juvenile titles about him. By the end of the first year of his presidency, add another four. By the end of his eight-year presidency, Bush inspired twenty-nine fewer books than Obama did in his first year—thirty titles in all, and that includes one anti-Bush satire, Dan Piraro’s The Three Little Pigs Buy the White House (2004). The marked difference in tone between the Bush book titles and the Obama book titles suggest that publishers and authors see the forty-fourth president quite differently from the forty-third…

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New research explains why we see Barack Obama as “black” rather than “white”

News of Otago
University of Otago, New Zealand

2010-11-25

Why do people tend to see biracial individuals such as Barack Obama as belonging to the minority group in their parentage rather than the majority one? According to new studies led by a University of Otago psychology researcher, this phenomenon—known as “hypodescent”—can be explained by underlying mechanisms in how human brains learn and categorise groups.

Otago Department of Psychology Associate Professor Jamin Halberstadt says that previously, the hypodescent phenomenon was presumed to be a product of one of several motivations: for example, to deny rights to minority group members, or to grant rights to restore historical inequities.

“Through our face perception research we show that hypodescent need not be motivated by prejudice or anything else, and that the same minority-biased perception of mixed-race individuals can emerge as a simple result of how our brains learn new groups,” Associate Professor Halberstadt says…

“So when people encounter biracial individuals, who exhibit features of both majority and minority groups, their minority features are more influential. In other words, Barack Obama is “black” because, due to most people’s learning history, his dark skin is especially strongly associated with that category,” he says…

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Through Mixed Eyes: The Biracial Experience and The Current State of Race in America

Williams College
2009-05-22
163 pages

Riki McDermott

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment Of the requirement for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors In Sociology

President Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States on January 20, 2009. For many, this election served as a turning point in American history. His inauguration represented hope and change, and drew attention to the ways in which race relations have evolved with time. That being said, his election fails to tell the complete story. His presence distracts us from the racial injustices and inequalities that continue to plague American society. However, the case of biracial Americans draws our attention back to the controlling racial forces that proceed to haunt social institutions, interactions, and identities. Biracial Americans figuratively and literally serve as bridges between different races, thus signaling the importance of their interpretations of modern race relations. Through their eyes, we are able to better understand and assess the current state of race in America.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Dedications and Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Initial Identity Formation of Biracials
• Chapter 2: The Renegotiation ofBiracial and Ethnic Identity
• Chapter 3: The Transformation of Biracial and Multiracial Passing
• Chapter 4: Interpreting the Realities of Racial Misidentifications
• Bibliography

We are currently living in the era of multiracialism. Whether we are aware of it or not, American culture is becoming saturated by multiracialism. The United States 2000 Census revealed that out of 281,421,906 individuals, 6,754,126 of them self-identified as multiracial. The sheer number of individuals of mixed race currently existing within the United States can therefore serve as an initial illustration of how multiracialism is growing in American culture. With a growing number of mixed race individuals, the likelihood of coming into contact with multiracials increases, thus intensifying the presence of multiracialism in American life. However, the media furthermore contributes to the spread of multiracialism today. As Americans we’ve come to depend on the media to keep us connected to the world outside of our own realm of experiences, resulting in its highly influential nature. Thus, whatever the media chooses to focus on, or however the media decides to spin a story, it generally dictates what the general American thinks about. As a result, when the media decides to focus its attention on two highly respected and distinguished men in American culture, who just happen to be multiracial, America listens…

…Biracial and multiracial individuals occupy an interesting space within American society; a space in which many of these individuals are forced to think about race with great frequency, as a result of our society not accounting for and recognizing many of the specific racial make-ups of multiracial individuals. This is problematic for mixed race individuals who desire for their specific racial make-up to be socially acknowledged, but who find it difficult to assert themselves within a social context dominated by distinct monoracial categories. I have found that as a result of having to deal with this dilemma, individuals of mixed races dedicate a lot of time to thinking about the social realities and consequences of race. Furthermore, I think individuals of mixed races serve as a metaphorical turning point between the past and the future. The past of this country was monoracial individuals, despite the fact that biracial and multiracial individuals existed, who were socially unacknowledged as such. And the future of this country is multiracial individuals, many of whom will be unaware of their exact racial make-up, due to a long legacy of racial mixing. Thus, multiracial individuals are now living within a society that continues to be dominated by a monoracial mentality, even though we claim not to be.  I therefore view these individuals as being able to sympathize with the monoracial tendencies of the past and present, as well as the multiracial tendencies that have begun to surface and will continue to emerge in the future. For these reasons, I see biracial and multiracial individuals as a group whose insights about the present and future state of racial America are especially crucial for a sociological analysis…

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Race remains hot topic despite Obama presidency

USA Today
2010-10-17

Shannon Mullen, Asbury Press

The election of the first black president in U.S. history was supposed to usher in a post-racial era in America.

But a series of controversies since then, from the White House “Beer Summit” to the conflicts between the tea party and NAACP, shows that race is still a hot-button issue.

“As a society, clearly we’re not over race,” said Hettie V. Williams, lecturer in the African American History Department at Monmouth University…

…But Williams, of Monmouth University, and others still see reason for optimism. Mixed marriages are on the rise, she noted, and more Americans of mixed parentage feel comfortable identifying themselves as multiracial.

In New Jersey, one of the most racially and ethnically diverse states in the country, nearly 2 of 3 residents say it is important for people of different races and ethnic groups to live, go to school and work closely together, according to the latest Monmouth University/Gannett New Jersey Press Media poll. Forty percent say blacks and whites are now treated equally..

…But Deepa Kumar, associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, sees disturbing parallels between the rise of right-wing, “anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim” groups across Europe and the rhetoric of the tea party and Pamela Geller’s Stop Islamization of America group, which has led the fight against the ground zero mosque…

…Tukufu Zuberi, a sociologist and professor of race relations at the University of Pennsylvania, says the media presents a superficial view of the role of race in America.

“There is a tremendous disconnect between what we see and hear and read in the media and the racial realities that people are experiencing in society,” Zuberi said…

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