Mixed Race Studies

The Sociological Significance of President Barack Obama

The American Sociological Association
Mini-Symposium
San Francisco, California
2009-08-08 through 2009-08-09

The historic campaign and election of Barack Obama constitutes a compelling and timely context for examining the program theme. In response, the 2009 ASA Program Committee and ASA President Patricia Hill Collins have organized a mini-symposium, a meeting within the general meeting, which explores how the historic election of Barack Obama might signal a new politics of community in action. The mini-symposium consists of a cluster of sessions that are scheduled throughout the meetings that will examine how the 2008 presidential election engages the conference theme The New Politics of Community.

1. Plenary Session. Why Obama Won (and What that Says About Democracy and Change in America)
2. Presidential Panel. A Defining Moment? Youth, Power and the Obama Phenomenon
3. Presidential Panel. Through the Lens of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Class: The Obama Family and the American Dream
4. Thematic Session. Understanding Democratic Renewal: The Movement to Elect Barack Obama
5. Thematic Session. The Future of Community Organizing During an Obama Presidency
6. Thematic Session. Asian-American Movements, Identities, and Politics: A New Racial Project in the Obama Years?
7. Professional Workshop. The Next Generation of MFP Scholarship in Service to Social Justice
8. Open Forum. Does the Obama Administration Need a Social Science Scholars Council?: A Public Forum

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A Premonition of Obama: La Raza Cosmica in America

New Perspectives Quarterly (NPQ)
Volume 26 Issue 4
Pages 100 – 110
Published Online: 2009-10-26
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5842.2009.01119.x

Ryszard Kapuscinski

Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died in 2007, was one of the 20th century’s greatest literary journalists. He personally witnessed the dramatic post-World War II upheavals of decolonization and revolution across what we used to call “the Third World” and set down his reflections in such best-selling books as The Emperor, about the fall of Haile Selassie [I] of Ethiopia, and Shah of Shahs, about the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. He served on NPQ’s editorial board until his death.

When I last saw Kapuscinski for coffee at the Hotel Bristol in Warsaw in the summer of 2005 he was busy preparing a lecture on Herodotus, the ancient Greek traveler and historian regarded as “the father of journalism.”

In 1987, NPQ brought Kapuscinski to Los Angeles to roam around and observe North America’s largest “Third World city.” He stayed at the New Seoul Hotel in the heart of Koreatown, venturing from there all the way down to Disneyland, Hispanic East L.A. and the wealthy Westside. At the end of each day, we sat down to gather his impressions.

Kapuscinski saw the United States as the place where the idea of “la raza cosmica”—the cosmic race—would be realized. For him, America was a premonition of the plural, racially mixed, culturally hybrid civilization the whole world would one day become. In a way, his insight was also a premonition of the presidency of Barack Obama, a self-described cultural and racial “mutt.” In a world where the contamination of globalization has sparked troubling yearnings for a return to purity, being a nation of mutts, Kapuscinski understood, is America’s competitive advantage.

Race mixing: Jones’ research has ties to political, sports figures

Richmond Now
The Faculty, Staff and Student Newspaper
University of Richmond

By Joan Tupponce
April 2007

No one is more intrigued with news about presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama or professional golfer Tiger Woods than Dr. Suzanne W. Jones, professor of English and women, gender and sexuality studies. But it’s not Obama’s bid for the presidency or Woods’ latest handicap that has Jones’ attention—it’s their racial identity, or more specifically, how they and others view their mixed ancestry.

For more than 20 years, Jones has been writing about and teaching classes about literature that explores U.S. race relations, especially black-white relationships. The idea for her latest book project stems from one of the chapters in her 2004 book Race Mixing: Southern Fiction since the Sixties. In her new work, Jones will be looking at the reappearance of the racially mixed character in the contemporary American imagination through the study of fiction, memoirs and family histories.

Jones first became personally interested in the topic about 15 years ago. “I taught a student in my African-American literature class whose mother was white and whose father was black,” she recalls.

Jones was unaware of the student’s heritage until she read a paper the student had written about her racial identity. Jones, like others, had assumed the student was white…

…The mulatto character figured prominently in American literature in the 19th century. “The so-called ‘tragic mulatto’ was used to point out the tragedy of defining race the way we did in the United States,” she explains. According to Jones’ research, the character disappeared by the 1960s—the time of the Black Power movement—only to resurface in the 1990s.

“This reappearance of the mixed character is happening in part because the children of 1960s mixed marriages have grown up and are writing both fiction and nonfiction,” Jones says. “Also an intense debate about racial classification began in the early 1990s, spurred both by racially mixed people and some parents of mixed children, particularly white parents, who didn’t want their children to be defined by the old ‘one-drop’ rule. This debate eventually led to a change on the 2000 U.S. census form, which allowed people to check more than one racial or ethnic category.”…

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Self-Perceived Minority Prototypicality and Identification in Mixed Race Individuals: Implications for Self-Esteem and Affirmative Action

SPSP 2010
The Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology
2010-01-28 through 2010-01-30
Las Vegas, Nevada

Jessica J. Good, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina

George F. Chavez
Department of Psychology
Rutgers University

Diana T. Sanchez, Associate Professor of Psychology
Rutgers University

In 2008, Barack Obama became the first multiracial individual to be elected President of the United States. Multiracial individuals are in the unique position of having multiple racial backgrounds with which to identify, ranging from monoracial (i.e. identifying with only one racial group) to extraracial (i.e. identifying with the human race; Renn, 2004). However, little research has examined the psychological processes linked to racial identification in mixed-race individuals. We proposed that the extent to which multiracial individuals identify as minority depends on their perceptions of their own prototypicality (similarity to the prototype of the minority group), which may be linked with feelings of connectedness to the minority group and perceived similarity in physical appearance to other members of the minority group. Data were collected from 107 mixed race minority-White participants using online sampling methods. Results from structural equation analysis supported our hypotheses; connectedness to the minority community and perceived similarity in physical appearance to members of the minority group predicted self-identification as minority due to perceived prototypicality. Additionally, minority identification was positively predictive of both psychological (self-esteem) and practical/real world (comfort applying for affirmative action) benefits. Implications for perceived affirmative action eligibility are discussed. These results add to a growing literature on the affective and behavioral consequences of multiracial individuals’ identity choices.

The Effects of Black Identity on Candidate Evaluations: An Exploratory Study

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 40, Number 2 (2009)
pages 215-237
DOI: 10.1177/0021934707309430

Jas M. Sullivan, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Louisiana State University

Keena N. Arbuthnot, Associate Professor of Education
Louisiana State University

Although Barack Obama’s entrance into the 2008 presidential campaign has been warmly received by Whites, Blacks have been somewhat ambivalent. Some even have claimed that Obama is not “Black.” The case of Barack Obama brings to the forefront the prospect of intragroup identity differences that exist among Blacks and the potential importance of a candidate’s racial background in elections. Consequently, the authors ask the following questions: (a) Does the racial background of a political candidate affect Black voters’ support and evaluation of a candidate’s personal attributes (i.e., trust, concern, strength, and qualification)? and (b) Focusing purely on the treatment groups separately (White, biracial, and Black candidates), does Black identity affect Blacks’ support and evaluation of a candidate’s personal attributes?  The experimental results of this exploratory study find race does make a difference on candidate support, and Black identity influences the way in which Black respondents perceive White, biracial, and Black candidates. As a result, these findings suggest that differences in how Blacks feel about a candidate will depend on the candidate’s racial background, their own attitudes and beliefs about being Black, and where they fall on various demographic and political measures.

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Obama, The Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future

Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters
Volume 31, Number 4 (2008)
pages 1033–1037
DOI: 10.1353/cal.0.0282

David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History
University of California at Berkeley

The focus of media depictions of Barack Obama as a “post-racial,” “post-black” or “postethnic” candidate is usually limited to two aspects of his presidential campaign.  First is his self-presentation with minimal references to his color. Unlike Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, whose presidential candidacies were more directed at the significance of the color line, Obama has never offered himself as the candidate of a particular ethnoracial group. Second, the press calls attention to the willingness of millions of white voters to respond to Obama.  Some of his greatest margins in primary elections and caucuses were in heavily white states like Idaho and Montana.  He even won huge numbers of white voters in some states of the old Confederacy, and in the November election carried Florida, Virginia and North Carolina.

But there is much more to it…

…Obama’s mixed ancestry generates some of the new uncertainty about blackness.  The white part of his genetic inheritance is not socially hidden, as it often is for “light-skinned blacks” who descend from black women sexually exploited by white slaveholders and other white males. Rather, Obama’s white ancestry is right there in the open, visible in the form of the white woman who, as a single mother, raised Obama after his black father left the family to return to his native Kenya. Press accounts of Obama’s life, as well as Obama’s own autobiographical writings, render Obama’s whiteness hard to miss.  No public figure, not even Tiger Woods, has done as much as Obama to make Americans of every education level and social surrounding aware of color-mixing in general and that most of the “black” population of the United States, in particular, are partially white. The “one-drop rule” which denies that color is a two-way street is far from dead, but not since the era of its legal and social consolidation in the early 1920s has the ordinance of this rule been so subject to challenge….

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The Geographical Imagination of Barack Obama: Representing Race and Space in America

Southeastern Geographer
Volume 49, Number 3, Fall 2009
pages 221-239
E-ISSN: 1549-6929 Print ISSN: 0038-366X
DOI: 10.1353/sgo.0.0049

Robert J. Kruse, II

It has been noted that the geographical work on race and space has often overlooked the geographies of individual African-Americans. This paper adds to the literature on race and space by focusing upon Barack Obama, the 44^th president of the United States.  Unusual in many ways, Obama offers the opportunity to combine two types of analysis in this paper. First, his memoir, Dreams From My Father, is treated as a geographical text through which we may gain insight into his geographical imagination. Second, this paper discusses the spatialization of racial identities, particularly whiteness, that have informed the public’s impressions of Obama.  Together, these discussions may help us to understand the point at which Barack Obama’s personal geographies intersect with larger racialized landscapes that show increasing hybridity and permeability.