Mixed Race Studies

Beyond Color-blind Universalism: Asians in a “Postracial America”

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 13, Number 3 (October 2010)
pages 327-342
E-ISSN: 1096-8598; Print ISSN: 1097-2129

Linda Trinh Võ, Associate Professor
Department of Asian American Studies School of Humanities
University of California, Irvine

Beyond the symbolism of President Barack Hussein Obama’s election is the unseen ways in which it is transforming the racial discourse in this country; however, whether it means a substantial transformation of structural inequities is more elusive. Does Obama’s election mean that the United States has moved beyond its historical legacy of slavery and institutionalized segregation? Are racial groups interchangeable in this colorblind universalism, so that one group can be merely substituted for another? We are in the process of digesting what his presidency means for Asian Americans on both a superficial or symbolic level, but also on the tangibles, namely the implementation of the campaign slogan “change we can believe in.” Recognizing that much remains uncertain for Asian Americans, I critique the connections, real and imagined, they have to the presidential election, provide cautionary notes on the post-racial narrative, and comment on the ongoing process and impact of racialization.

Read or purchase the article here.

What Obama Isn’t: Black Like Me on Race

New York Daily News
2006-11-02

Stanley Crouch

If Barack Obama makes it all the way to becoming the Democratic nominee for President in 2008, a feat he says he may attempt, a much more complex understanding of the difference between color and ethnic identity will be upon us for the very first time.

Back in 2004, Alan Keyes made this point quite often. Keyes was the black Republican carpetbagger chosen by the elephants to run against Obama for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. The choice of Keyes was either a Republican version of affirmative action or an example of just how dumb the party believes black voters to be, since it was obvious that Keyes came from the Southeast, not the Midwest.

That race was never much of a contest, but one fascinating subplot was how Keyes was unable to draw a meaningful distinction between himself as a black American and Obama as an African-American. After all, Obama’s mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan. Other than color, Obama did not—does not—share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves…

Read the enter opinion here.

Mulattobama

The Guardian
2008-08-14

Emily Raboteau, Associate Professor of English
The City College of New York

As Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has shown, being mixed race in America means balancing black and white identities

My boyfriend, Victor, and I flew into Kingston the day after Barack Obama clinched the Democratic party nomination. We were giddy. A trip to Jamaica and a potential black president. We were discussing Obama’s campaign on the flight down when Victor suddenly asked: “How would you feel if our baby came out looking white?”

“Negro, puhleez,” I said, polishing off my airline peanuts. “I am not pregnant.”

“Answer the question,” he pushed…

Read the entire article here.

Colby Cosh: Obama’s family tree might have hung him from a limb

National Post
2008-10-24

Colby Cosh

Ever since Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination for the presidency, American political observers have been arguing endlessly over whether his race will be a net help or a hindrance to him at the polls November 4. Strangely, though, there has been less discussion over the crude binary characterization of Senator Obama as “black.”

Even in the most progressive American circles, it seems, the “one-drop rule” of racial categorization, a heritage of slavery, still holds sway. For taxonomic purposes, a man with a white mother and a black father is a black man. Obama discovered very early in life that he could not defy the rules of this game. And if he wins the election, his own biography will demonstrate that it is easier to succeed in America as a multiracial individual who self-identifies as black than it is to live with a blurred racial identity. Being “black” has enabled him to represent a dream of racial conciliation for all Americans more easily than being a trans- or post-racial figure would.

The strange part about this narrative is that Obama’s black ancestors aren’t even African-American; he is the son of a dynamic, brilliant Kenyan economist and politician he hardly ever knew. His black identity comes from outside American history. And reporters have barely scratched the surface of his white maternal ancestry, the part of him, so to speak, that lies fully within America, complete with all the contradictions and horrors of its past.

And here’s another strange fact: It is easier to show Barack Obama’s descent from slave-owning American colonists than it is to establish any genealogical connection between himself and American slaves. In many ways, a WASP family-tree snob of the 19th century would probably be more impressed with Obama’s mother’s background than with John McCain’s people. (Both candidates can claim direct descent from King Edward I.) A 2007 investigation by the Baltimore Sun found that Obama’s direct maternal ancestors included slaveowners from the time of William and Mary right down to the eve of the U.S. Civil War, a war in which he had family on both sides.

And the closer you look, the weirder things get…

Read the entire article here.

Reducing Race: News Themes in the 2008 Primaries

The International Journal of Press/Politics
Volume 15, Number 4 (October 2010)
pages 375-400
DOI: 10.1177/1940161210372962

Catherine R. Squires, Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity and Equality
University of Minnesota

Sarah J. Jackson
University of Minnesota

This article presents a content analysis exploring how racial issues were addressed in newspaper and news magazine coverage of the 2008 Democratic primaries. Despite the presence of Latino and biracial candidates, discussion of race was limited by binary racial frames, resulting in the construction of racial groups as competing voting blocs (including frequent references to white voters) and few references to Barack Obama’s biracial heritage. The dominant framing constricted the range of racial issues to matters of interpersonal insensitivity and misguided statements and ignored matters of public policy and racial equity.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Election of Barack Obama and the Politics of Interracial and Same-Sex Marriage

History News Network
2009-02-23

Peggy Pascoe, Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History
University of Oregon

Peggy Pascoe is the author of “What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America”, (winner of 5 literary prizes).

The election (and now the inauguration) of Barack Obama has inspired a widespread sense of awe at the scope and scale of change in race relations in America—and more than a hint of self-congratulation.

The news media just can’t seem to resist trumpeting the example of interracial marriage. When Barack Obama’s white mother married his black father in 1961, reporters remind us, their marriage would have been illegal in more than a dozen states. See how far we’ve come, they enthuse, falling into the trap of assuming that the legality of interracial marriage is proof that racism and white supremacy have disappeared into thin air and a colorblind utopia is on the way.

As someone who has spent nearly two decades studying the history of interracial marriage in America, I want to suggest that at a moment when talk of change seems to be everywhere, we could use a bit less celebration—and a lot more reflection…

…It does not, however, follow that interracial marriage is synonymous with colorblindness or that the end of racism is at hand. Generations of lawyers had to fight to make interracial marriage a legal right. Many of them thought colorblindness was a wonderful idea, but few were naive enough to believe it actually existed. Today the assertion that America is a colorblind nation is so commonplace that even the most conservative of Supreme Court justices are eager to wrap themselves in its mantle. Yet forty years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia, marriages between blacks and whites are still the rarest form of interracial marriage, and interracial couples still face a host of challenges, from stares on the street to confusion on the faces of their children’s teachers and playmates. And in yet another example of racism’s shape-shifting power, America’s prisons, police, schools, and housing markets offer daily evidence of how easy it is for claims of colorblindness to co-exist with, and even enable, new forms of white entitlement…

Read the entire article here.

Race in the Race: Mixed Race Identity and Obama’s Campaign

National Communications Association 95th Annual Convention
Chicago Hilton & Towers, Chicago, IL
2009-11-11
15 pages

Iliana Rucker
University of New Mexico

During Obama’s campaign, a video was created by the Los Angeles Times consisting of interviews with individuals who identify as multiracial. Three sections within the video are identified: assumptions about race, assumptions about racism, and the ideal of transcending race. Each section contains progressive and non-progressive stances on issues concerning multiracial identity and Obama’s candidacy. Obama’s presence in the campaign and his election may recast how race is talked about for the future.

Read the entire paper here.

Political partisanship influences perception of biracial candidates’ skin tone

Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences
Volume 106, Number 48 (2009-12-01)
pages 20168-20173
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0905362106

Eugene M. Caruso, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science
Booth School of Business, University of Chicago

Nicole L. Mead, Researcher
Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research
Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Emily Balcetis, Assistant Professor of Psychology
New York University

Edited by Richard E. Nisbett, Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor of Psychology
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

People tend to view members of their own political group more positively than members of a competing political group. In this article, we demonstrate that political partisanship influences people’s visual representations of a biracial political candidate’s skin tone. In three studies, participants rated the representativeness of photographs of a hypothetical (Study 1) or real (Barack Obama; Studies 2 and 3) biracial political candidate. Unbeknownst to participants, some of the photographs had been altered to make the candidate’s skin tone either lighter or darker than it was in the original photograph. Participants whose partisanship matched that of the candidate they were evaluating consistently rated the lightened photographs as more representative of the candidate than the darkened photographs, hereas participants whose partisanship did not match that of the candidate showed the opposite pattern. For evaluations of Barack Obama, the extent to which people rated lightened photographs as representative of him was positively correlated with their stated voting intentions and reported voting behavior in the 2008 Presidential election. This effect persisted when controlling for political ideology and racial attitudes. These results suggest that people’s visual representations of others are related to their own preexisting beliefs and to the decisions they make in a consequential context.

Read the entire article here.

100% Multiracial

UrbanFaith.com
2010-06-11

Kyle Waalen

The latest Census estimates show that multiracial people are the fastest growing demographic group in the United States. Yet many still struggle with the question of how many boxes to check. Two Christian women share about the tension and joy of being young and multiracial in America.

Kristy McDonald and Alicia Edison have a lot in common. They are both 27, both Christian women, and they are both children of an African American father and Caucasian mother. If we’re living in a multiracial world, as current demographic trends reveal, then Kristy and Alicia reflect the new face of American society. But is America ready?

The 2010 U.S. Census has reignited the debate about how society pressures multiracial people to choose one race over the other. In fact, President Obama made headlines when he selected “Black” on his census form rather than checking multiple boxes. The boxes we choose indicate more than just the color of our skin. For many reasons, racial identity still matters in America.

UrbanFaith’s Kyle Waalen asked Kristy, a caregiver at a group home for adults with disabilities in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Alicia, a Ph.D. student in sociology at the University of North Texas, to offer their personal perspectives on the challenges of being a mixed-race person in a multiracial society that hasn’t yet figured out how to be multiracial…

…Do ever feel that, as a multiracial person, you fall between the cracks when it comes to racial labels?

KRISTY: First of all, I am multiracial, but my skin tone is very light. When I was younger, I was part of a club at my local YMCA. It was designed to help African American girls make good choices about going to college and doing well in school. When guest speakers came to talk to us, they didn’t know what to think about my skin color. All the other girls at the club where dark-skinned, but I was not.

ALICIA: A multiracial person may fall through the cracks if they choose not to define themselves within the categories that society assigns. On most forms, we are given an alternative of choosing “other.” “Other” is not okay. It is not sufficient. “Other” means that we will continue to be marginalized and that we don’t count. We should be given the option to name ourselves when and how we choose…

Read the entire article here.

Running Through the Trenches: Or, an Introduction to the Undead Culture Wars and Dead Serious Identity Politics

Journal of Communication Inquiry
Volume 34, Number 3 (July 2010)
pages 210-253

Catherine R. Squires, Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity and Equality
University of Minnesota

The events of the 2008 election continue to spark prognostications that we live in a world that is postracial/feminist, and so on. At the 2009 NCA (National Communication Association) convention, a panel of communication scholars discussed how to approach questions of identity and communication over the next 5 years. Participants suggested ways to be critical of assertions of “post” and elaborated ways to encounter new dimensions of identification in an era of immense sociopolitical challenges. This forum revisits the exchanged dialogues among the participants at the roundtable and further explores the meaning of post- in post-America.

Part I: A Meditation on a Mutt in the White House

As the press scrutinized his family’s process of choosing a canine companion, President Obama noted his preference for a “mutt,” and playfully characterized himself as “a mutt.” His remarks simultaneously conjure theories of transgressive cultural hybridity and the theory of hybrid vigor. Jon Powell opined that we’d know multiracialism was real when whiteness was not dependent upon purity; when one such as Obama could as easily claim white as black racial identity. The scene at the “mutt” press conference at first glance could be a moment of ascendant hybridity, a rejection of assimilation and purity projects, no longer tying the identity of the nation to homogeneity.

But Obama’s use of “mutt”—particularly within the context of discussing “pure breeds” versus canines without official provenance—reveals the continued, stubborn conflation of race and blood, reifying pure categories even as it celebrates positive outcomes of hybridization. Although Obama’s tongue may have been firmly planted in cheek, does everyone get the joke? It becomes clearer each day that his mutt identity evokes anything but humor from other folks, who see him as a half-bred abomination (Obamanation, anyone?).

Hybridity offers potential to subvert dominant narratives of purity, but these opportunities are neither guaranteed nor the only possibilities that may emerge. Garcia Cancelini sees hybridity as the liminal space where negotiation and struggle occur, and oh, what struggles we are seeing as members of the media, the government, and the public render their own responses to the Age of Obama, an allegedly postracial, postfeminist, post-Marxist, postculture wars time of bliss. These responses come so fast and so furious these days I keep rewriting this introductory essay, inserting newer references to outrageous outbursts and expressions of bigotry, the bigotry that we were supposed to have overcome on November 4, 2008…

Read the entire article here.