Mixed Race Studies

Good Question: Is Obama The First Black President?

WCCO-TV
Good Question
2008-11-05

Jason Derush, Reporter

You can’t turn on television or read a newspaper without seeing a reference to Sen. Barack Obama, the first black President. But wait a minute, said Naomi Banks, if Obama has a white mother, “My question is… why isn’t he the first biracial American President?” asked Banks.

“I think it’s more representative of reality,” she added. “It represents our country and how it’s changing with demographics.”

Banks said she has a special interest in the question, because she considers herself to be multiracial.

“My mother is Caucasian, my father is Native American and African-American,” she explained. “I’m proud of all aspects of my heritage,” said Banks, who said she couldn’t imagine leaving part of it out.

“I think of him as being an African-American of multiracial ancestry,” said Enid Logan, Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota.

Logan’s team has been interviewing University of Minnesota students about their racial attitudes in relation to the candidacy of President-Elect Obama…

…”Is the black/white binary still the primary axis around which races relations in the U.S. revolve?” asked Logan. “I think for the most part it absolutely is.”

Logan said that people feel a need to label others in terms of race, because along with gender, race is one way that American society has been historically organized. It’s a shortcut.

“It’s a society that sees itself as colorblind, but race is important. And people feel disoriented if they can’t figure out what race other people are, they don’t know how to interact with them,” explained Logan…

Read the entire article here.

Even discussing ‘angry black man’ stereotype provokes anger

CNN
2010-06-16

John Blake

(CNN) — Here are some sound bites from the post-racial era:

“The long legged Mac Daddy in the White House is angry this morning. Seems to me we should change the name to the Black House for the next few years. Your news organization obviously is very racist.”

And:

“I don’t care what anyone says. If Obama takes to heart the calls for anger in this crisis all bets are off! White America will dump him right on his black a#s.”

Last week, CNN published an article entitled “Why Obama doesn’t dare become the ‘angry black man’ ” after critics complained that President Obama had not displayed enough anger in response to the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

The article quoted scholars on race relations who said many white Americans would be unsettled by Obama losing his temper because he would evoke the stereotype of the angry African-American man.

…The phrase comes as no surprise to Rainier Spencer, director of Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

Spencer said the angry black man stereotype has its origins in slavery. During slavery, white men feared black men like Nat Turner who resisted slavery. They were the black men who led slave insurrections and were sold further South. They were called Bucks.

“There’s the image of the minstrel, the happy, silly Negro who is fun to watch and laugh at. But the other one—the Buck—is the one you have to be careful about,” Spencer said.

The angry black man stereotype persisted after the end of slavery, Spencer said. Black militants in the civil rights movement; today’s black male rap artists—all are equated with some variation of the angry black man, Spencer said.

But Spencer said the angry black man stereotype doesn’t have the bite it once had. Certain black male public figures—Obama, Colin Powell—can display anger…

Why do we have to talk so much about race?

But who says a black man is running the country?

Some readers got miffed because CNN identified Obama as a black president. He’s biracial, they say.

“CNN get your facts straight—he is an angry half-black man! CNN you are a bunch of idiot race-baiters.”

Another:

“Maybe the 50 percent white part of him keeps the 50 percent angry black part calm and collected and on an even keel. Hmmm, that might be worthy of a university study! Could be ground-breaking science here! I’ll bet the guvment’ would even pay for it!”

Spencer, the race scholar from UNLV, said that Obama has already made his identity choice. He identified himself as black on his census form. He is perceived and accepted as black my most African-Americans.

Obama’s racial background doesn’t make him unlike most blacks; it makes him similar to most blacks, Spencer said.

Spencer, who is writing a book on mixed race, said an estimated 90 percent of African-Americans have white ancestors, including Michelle Obama, the first lady.

“It doesn’t make sense to talk about mixed race unless you’re going to include all 30 million African-Americans,” said Spencer, author of the upcoming book, “Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix.”…

Read the entire article here.

Race 2008: Critical Reflections on an Historic Campaign

BrownWalker Press
2010
229 pages
ISBN-10: 1599425378
ISBN-13: 9781599425375

Edited by

Myra Mendible, Professor of English and Department Chair for Language and Literature
Florida Gulf Coast University

Race 2008: Critical Reflections on an Historic Campaign brings together a diverse group of scholars and activists to examine the gendered politics, images, rhetorical practices, and racial/ethnic conflicts that served as a backdrop to this momentous election. It features perspectives marginalized or ignored by mainstream media and political pundits, thus providing alternative, critical insights on the social dynamics fueling campaign rhetoric, grassroots activism, and intergroup conflicts in 2008 and beyond.

Table of Contents

• Contributors
• Introduction: Post-Election Blues; Myra Mendible
• Cracks in the Ceiling: Gender and Sexuality
  • 1. Making Space: Articulating an Inclusive Framework of Reproductive and Sexual Health Politics; Tanya Bakhru
  • 2. What Kind of Feminist is a ‘Feminist for Life’? The Case of Sarah Palin; Françoise Coste
• What’s in a Name? The Politics of Identity
  • 3. The Election’s Imagined Identities: The Ghettoization of Muslims in the Race for the White House; Cyra Akila Chodhury
  • 4. From Rev. Wright to “Joe the Plumber”: Racial and Class Anxieties in the 2008 Elections; John M. Cox
  • 5. Black with ‘White Blood’? To Advertise, or Not Advertise, the Race of Obama’s Mother; Daniel McNeil
• Visual Media and Representation
  • 6. Out of the Wilderness into the Spotlight: Celebrity and Radical Prophecy in the Obama Presidential Campaign; Margaret Cavin Hambrick
  • 7. Obama, McCain, and Alfred E. Smith: Putting the “Comic” Back in “Comic Frame”; Katherine Hale
• Ethnic Constituencies on the Front Lines
  • 8. “Why is Barack Obama a Filipino?” Race, Immigrant Identities, and Community Organizing among Filipino Americans; Estella Habal
  • 9. Baiting Red, Turning Blue: The Dynamics of Change in Cuban Miami; Myra Mendible
  • 10. Did Obama Have an “Asian Problem”? Oiyan A. Poon
• Index

Read the first 25 pages here.

Interracial marriage still rising in U.S.

Associated Press
2010-05-26

Hope Yen, Associated Press Writer

About 8 percent of U.S. marriages are mixed-race

WASHINGTON – Melting pot or racial divide? The growth of interracial marriages is slowing among U.S.-born Hispanics and Asians. Still, blacks are substantially more likely than before to marry whites.

The number of interracial marriages in the U.S. has risen 20 percent since 2000 to about 4.5 million, according to the latest census figures. While still growing, that number is a marked drop-off from the 65 percent increase between 1990 and 2000.

About 8 percent of U.S. marriages are mixed-race, up from 7 percent in 2000…

“Racial boundaries are not going to disappear anytime soon,” said Daniel Lichter, a professor of sociology and public policy at Cornell University. He noted the increase in anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks as well as current tensions in Arizona over its new immigration law…

…Broken down by race, about 40 percent of U.S.-born Asians now marry whites — a figure unchanged since 1980. Their likelihood of marrying foreign-born Asians, meanwhile, multiplied 3 times for men and 5 times for women, to roughly 20 percent.

Among U.S.-born Hispanics, marriages with whites increased modestly from roughly 30 percent to 38 percent over the past three decades. But when it came to marriages with foreign-born Hispanics, the share doubled — to 12.5 percent for men, and 17.1 percent for women.

In contrast, blacks are now three times as likely to marry whites than in 1980. About 14.4 percent of black men and 6.5 percent of black women are currently in such mixed marriages, due to higher educational attainment, a more racially integrated military and a rising black middle class that provides more interaction with other races…

‘Multi’ label shunned

Due to increasing interracial marriages, multiracial Americans are a small but fast-growing demographic group, making up about 5 percent of the minority population. Together with blacks, Hispanics and Asians, the Census Bureau estimates they collectively will represent a majority of the U.S. population by mid-century.

Still, many multiracial people — particularly those who are part black — shun a “multi” label in favor of identifying as a single race.

By some estimates, two-thirds of those who checked the single box of “black” on the census form are actually mixed, including President Barack Obama, who identified himself as black in the 2010 census even though his mother was white…

Read the entire article here.

Not-Black by Default

The Nation
Diary of a Mad Law Professor
2010-04-21

Patricia J. Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law
Columbia University

Most people who appear phenotypically “black” don’t play around when the government asks them to report their race.

Last week, Melissa Harris-Lacewell wrote an insightful column, “Black by Choice,” about President Obama’s having checked the box marked “Black, African American or Negro” on his Census form. As she notes, despite the way his complex heritage both disrupts “standard definitions of blackness” and creates “a definitional crisis for whiteness,” in American culture “having a white parent has never meant becoming white” if one also has an African-descended parent…

Read the entire article here.

Census trend shows mixed-race Americans are more likely to identify with their multiracial background

Daily Bruin
University of California, Los Angeles
2010-05-18

Brittany Wong, Bruin contributor

When President Barack Obama got to Question No. 9 on the 2010 Census, he did what mixed-race respondents nationwide were asked to do: pare down and define his complex racial background by checking all the boxes he saw fit.

His decision to exclusively check “Black, African Am., or Negro” and the fractured response that followed speaks to the complex nature of being mixed race today, said Kyeyoung Park, an associate professor of sociocultural anthropology at UCLA who teaches a class about race.

A new generation of mixed-race people are coming into their own this decade, and as they do, many are more comfortable self-identifying in a way that encompasses all of their background, Park said…

…Miguel Unzueta, a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management who conducted a study that showed that self-identified mixed-race children were better adjusted in school, said he was somewhat surprised by Obama’s decision. Given the president’s discussion of his mixed heritage during the primaries, he said he expected a census answer more in line with his talk on the campaign trail.

But the decision also speaks to the reality that the way Americans talk about race is not always the way they think, he said.

“I think people are more comfortable with having a mixed-race background, but there still isn’t a label that we’re comfortable with in society,” Unzueta said…

Read the entire article here.

The President, the Professor, and the Wide Receiver

When the biracial U.S. President Barack Obama visits South Korea tomorrow, he will be visiting a country grappling with its prejudices about race.

Foreign Policy
2009-11-17

James Card

This week, U.S. President Barack Obama, the son of a black father and white mother, is making his landmark visit to Asia, including a Wednesday stop in Seoul, where South Korea is in the midst of a racial reckoning. His visit could have positive repercussions for years to come. Race is a thorny issue in the country, and biracial persons especially so. Both North and South Koreans embrace pure bloodlines, untainted by non-Korean DNA. Biracial children are broadly considered unadoptable, and children and adults of mixed race endure ostracism and bullying. But in the past few years, a number of events and people have made South Koreans reconsider racism and persons of mixed race…

Read the entire article here.

Census Nonsense: Why Barack Obama isn’t black.

The New Republic
2010-04-07

John Judis, Senior Editor and Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

When asked about his race on the census form, Barack Obama, the child of a white Kansan and black African, did not take the option of checking both “white” and “black” or “some other race.” Instead, he checked “black, African American or Negro.” By doing that, Obama probably did what was expected of him, but he also confirmed an enduring legacy of American racism…

…The obvious question—perhaps not to an American, but certainly to a visitor from another planet—is why if someone’s ancestry is predominantly white, they are not identified as “white” rather than “black.” It’s not because of the way they look. Walter White was widely “mistaken” as a white person. As a student at Colgate, Adam Clayton Powell [, Jr.] was initially believed to be “white.” But once it became known that they had black ancestry, they became black. And American law backed up this conclusion. In the South, the idea that any black ancestry would qualify someone as black, negro, or colored was called the “one-drop rule.”…

…In its American incarnation, blackness emerged as a social category in the seventeenth century as part of Southern whites’ attempt to justify the economic and social subordination of Africans who had been brought to the country in bondage. The legal interpretation of blackness was accompanied by laws barring miscegenation between whites and blacks. The one-drop rule endured after the Civil War and after emancipation as a justification of racial segregation and of the tiered economy of the sharecroppers…

Read the entire article here.

In First Lady’s Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery

The New York Times
2009-10-08

Rachel L. Swarns

Jodi Kantor

WASHINGTON — In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl valued soon afterward at $475.

In his will, she is described simply as the “negro girl Melvinia.” After his death, she was torn away from the people and places she knew and shipped to Georgia. While she was still a teenager, a white man would father her first-born son under circumstances lost in the passage of time.

In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, represents the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House.

Melvinia Shields, the enslaved and illiterate young girl, and the unknown white man who impregnated her are the great-great-great-grandparents of Michelle Obama, the first lady…

While President Obama’s biracial background has drawn considerable attention, his wife’s pedigree, which includes American Indian strands, highlights the complicated history of racial intermingling, sometimes born of violence or coercion, that lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans. Mrs. Obama and her family declined to comment for this article, aides said, in part because of the personal nature of the subject.

“She is representative of how we have evolved and who we are,” said Edward Ball, a historian who discovered that he had black relatives, the descendants of his white slave-owning ancestors, when he researched his memoir, “Slaves in the Family.”

“We are not separate tribes of Latinos and whites and blacks in America,” Mr. Ball said. “We’ve all mingled, and we have done so for generations.”…

Read the entire article here.

Obama’s census mark reveals race views

The Washington Times
2010-04-30

Joseph Curl

America’s first black president has deliberately shied away from spurring a national discussion on race, most recently by checking only “African-American” on his U.S. census form without offering a word of explanation about his choice.

The studied silence from the bully pulpit held by President Obama has frustrated multiracial organizations, giving rise to questions about whether the president acted out of political consideration and why the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas would not acknowledge his mother’s heritage.

“It’s frustrating from a point that there’s a lot of multiracial people out there who see Obama doing that, knowing that he is multiracial, and they think that maybe that’s the right choice,” said Ryan Graham, the product of a mixed-race marriage whose mother founded Project Race in 1991 to push for a multiracial classification on the census form.

“But there’s a lot of people saying maybe it’s the wrong choice,” he said…

…There is no question that Mr. Obama’s decision complies with the goals of U.S. census officials; the answer to Question 9 about race is exclusively about “self-identification in which respondents choose the race or races with which they most closely identify.”

“The racial categories included in the census form generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country, and are not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically or genetically,” the Census Bureau says in its “2010 Census Constituent FAQs.”…

…But the president’s decision to check only “black” on his census form makes complete sense to Charles W. Mills, a researcher on race and a professor at Northwestern University.

“Race is a social convention. For him to claim whiteness would be rejected by the social convention of the country. The way I see it, his decision was a perfectly reasonable one, given that this is how the American rules have been,” Mr. Mills said…

Read the entire article here.