Mixed Race Studies

Shades of Race: How Phenotype and Observer Characteristics Shape Racial Classification

American Behavioral Scientist
Published online before print 2015-10-28
DOI: 10.1177/0002764215613401

Cynthia Feliciano, Associate Professor of Sociology; Associate Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies
University of California, Irvine

Although race-based discrimination and stereotyping can only occur if people place others into racial categories, our understanding of this process, particularly in contexts where observers categorize others based solely on appearance, is limited. Using a unique data set drawn from observers’ assessments of photos posted by White, Black, Latino, and multiracial online daters, this study examines how phenotype and observer characteristics influence racial categorization and cases of divergence between self-identities and others’ classifications. I find that despite the growth in the multiracial population, observers tend to place individuals into monoracial categories, including Latino. Skin color is the primary marker used to categorize others by race, with light skin associated with Whiteness, medium skin with Latinidad, and, most strongly, dark skin with Blackness. Among daters who self-identify as Black along with other racial categories, those with dark skin are overwhelmingly placed solely into a Black category. These findings hold across observers, but the proportion of photos placed into different racial categories differs by observers’ gender and race. Thus, estimates of inequality may vary depending not only on how race is assessed but also on who classifiers are. I argue that patterns of racial categorization reveal how the U.S. racial structure has moved beyond binary divisions into a system in which Latinos are seen as a racial group in-between Blacks and Whites, and a dark-skin rule defines Blacks’ racial options.

Read or purchase the article here.

Diversity and Multiracial Voices

Mount Holyoke Radix
South Hadley, Massachusetts
2015-11-10

Sonia Mohammadzadah ’18, Contributing Writer

***Please note: my use of the term “cultural org” includes both cultural orgs associated with cultural houses and those that are not.

As someone who identifies as biracial, I’m never quite sure where I stand or what my role is in the discussion of race. I am half-White, and have thus benefited from certain privileges awarded to white people. However, I am also half-Afghan, and have consequently faced discrimination typically inflicted upon those of a Middle Eastern background, though I am an American-born citizen. When I try and contribute to conversations on race from both a White and non-White perspective, I often feel (and have been told) that I am “playing both sides” on a field that has been clearly divided into two distinct teams. While some may argue my position as a biracial person offers valuable insight in racial dialogue, I’ve noticed that a multiracial, multicultural point of view is not often sought. It is assumed that you are either White, or you are not White. Where is the space for individuals who are both?…

Read the entire article here.

Taye Diggs Isn’t Wrong (Or Right) About His Son’s Biracial Identity

The Establishment
2015-11-20

Jessica Sutherland, Marketing Director

In October, Taye Diggs released Mixed Me! as a followup to his first children’s book, 2011’s Chocolate Me! While Chocolate Me! was inspired by Diggs’ experiences as a black child in a predominantly white neighborhood, Mixed Me! focuses on the hope he has for his biracial son.

While doing press for the book this month, Diggs (aka my most famous Twitter follower, and probably yours too) enraged a lot of people by choosing to describe his 6-year-old son Walker as biracial, rather than black, in order to acknowledge both of his parents’ cultures (Walker’s mother is the actress/singer Idina Menzel, who is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent)…

…The controversy has stirred up fresh debate about the divisive issue of biracial self-identification—a divisiveness I, and many other mixed-race people, have experienced firsthand. Personally, as a biracial American, I prefer to be identified as such. But my Establishment colleague, Ijeoma Oluo, who is also biracial, prefers to identify as black.

Neither of us are wrong…

Read the entire article here.

Between Two Worlds: Racial Identity in Alice Perrin’s The Stronger Claim

Victorian Literature and Culture
Volume 42, Special Issue 3, September 2014
pages 491-508
DOI: 10.1017/S1060150314000114

Melissa Edmundson Makala
University of South Carolina

Like many Anglo-Indian novelists of her generation, Alice Perrin (1867–1934) gained fame through the publication and popular reception of several domestic novels based in India and England. However, within the traditional Anglo-Indian romance plot, Perrin often incorporated subversive social messages highlighting racial and cultural problems prevalent in India during the British Raj. Instead of relying solely on one-dimensional, sentimental British heroes and heroines, Perrin frequently chose non-British protagonists who reminded her contemporary readers of very real Anglo-Indian racial inequalities they might wish to forget. In The Stronger Claim (1903), Perrin creates a main character who has a mixed-race background, but who, contrary to prevailing public opinion of the time, is a multi-dimensional, complex, and perhaps most importantly, sympathetic character positioned between two worlds. Even as Victorian India was coming to an end, many of the problems that had plagued the British Raj intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century. Perrin’s novel is one of the earliest attempts to present a sympathetic and heroic mixed-race protagonist, one whose presence asked readers to question the lasting negative effects of race relations and racial identity in both India and England.

“Most Fitting Companions”: Making Mixed-Race Bodies Visible in Antebellum Public Spaces

Theatre Survey
Volume 56, Issue 2, May 2015
pages 138-165
DOI: 10.1017/S0040557415000046

Lisa Merrill, Professor of Speech Communication, Rhetoric, Performance Studies
Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York

In the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War, free and fugitive persons of color were aware of the need to frame how they were seen in their everyday lives as part of an arsenal of rhetorical strategies to attract audiences to the abolitionist cause. In this article, I examine three spatial contexts that nineteenth-century mixed-race persons navigated for abolitionist ends in which their hybrid bodies were featured as an aspect of their public performances. These locations—Britain’s imperially sponsored Crystal Palace, a Brooklyn church pulpit, and the dramatic reader’s lectern—were not merely static places but were spaces animated and made meaningful by the interactions performed therein. Each framed a particular ocular and locational politics and strategically imbued some degree of social class privilege on the hybrid persons following its social scripts. But in so doing, each setting also reinforced colorism and contributed to notions of the supremacy of “whiteness” even while it furthered an antislavery agenda.

Race, Ethnicity, and Human Appearance

Chapter in Encyclopedia of Body Image and Human Appearance
2012
Pages 707–710
DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-12-384925-0.00111-5

S. McClure
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

M. Poole
Emery University, Atlanta, Georgia

E.P. Anderson-Fye
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

This article examines the intersection of race, ethnicity, and the body. Standards of beauty, as they are expressed globally in commodity culture, involve a ‘rhetoric of feminine ugliness’. This rhetoric presents that women’s bodies are always in need of manipulation, alteration, and discipline to attain a beauty ideal. Increasingly, so are men’s. However, racial and, to some extent, ethnic categorizations complicate narratives about the nature of beauty. How do racialized appearance and the rhetoric of ugliness interact in social, economic, and political contexts? Is beauty less a matter of engagement in ‘beauty work’ and more innate and inextricable from race and ethnicity? If beauty is a matter heavily influenced by cultural consensus, are the cultural structures of history and ideology any more mutable with respect to matters of race and ethnicity? This article addresses these questions.

Glossary

• Aesthetics The theory of beauty.
• A priori Derived by reasoning from self-evident propositions; knowing independent of any experience.
• Culture A complex historical and symbol system, constructed by invention and borrowing, that acts to instill long-lasting orientations, conceptions, motivations, and associated practices.
• Morphology The form or structure of an organism or any of its parts.
• Race A social category derived from a folk perception of heredity that corresponds to some degree with genetics, but is not genetically determined.

Read the entire chapter here.

A Change Has Come: Race, Politics, and the Path to the Obama Presidency

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
Volume 6, Issue 01, Spring 2009
pages 1-14
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X09090018

Lawrence D. Bobo, W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences
Harvard University

Michael C. Dawson, John D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science
University of Chicago

Has Barack Obama’s success transformed the racial divide? Did he somehow transcend or help bring to an end centuries of racial division in the United States? Did he deliberately run a strategically race-neutral, race-evading campaign? Did his race and ingrained American racism constrain the reach of his success? Have we arrived at that postracial moment that has long been the stuff of dreams and high oratory? Or was the outcome of the 2008 presidential election driven entirely by nonracial factors, such as a weak Republican ticket, an incumbent party saddled with defending an unpopular war, and a worsening economic crisis? It is at once too simple and yet entirely appropriate to say that the answers to these questions are, in a phrase, complicated matters. These complexities can, however, be brought into sharper focus.

Read the entire article here.

Violent Disruptions: Richard Wright and William Faulkner’s Racial Imaginations

Harvard University
September 2013
177 pages

Linda Doris Mariah Chavers

A dissertation presented to The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of African and African American Studies

Violent Disruptions contends that the works of Richard Wright and William Faulkner are mirror images of each other and that each illustrates American race relations in distinctly powerful and prescient ways. While Faulkner portrays race and American identity through sex and its relationship to the imagination, Wright reveals a violent undercurrent beneath interracial encounters that the shared imagination triggers. Violent Disruptions argues that the spectacle of the interracial body anchors the cultural imaginations of our collective society and, as it embodies and symbolizes American slavery, drives the violent acts of individuals. Interracial productions motivate the narratives of Richard Wright and William Faulkner through a system of displacement of signs. Though these tropes maintain their currency today, they are borne out of cultural imaginings over two hundred years old. Working within the framework of the imaginary, Violent Disruptions places these now historical texts into the twenty-first century’s discourse of race and American identity.

In the first part of the dissertation, I show in detail the various narratives at work in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) in order to portray the imaginations shared by the white characters and disrupted by the interracial body as spectacle. Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) depicts a similar racial imaginary but with more focus on its violent, corporeal effects. By contrast, in the second half of the dissertation, I demonstrate the writers’ central and racially charged characters from their earlier works, Light in August (1932) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin [Children] (1938; 1940) and look at how the figures of Joe Christmas and Big Boy, respectively, work as literary prototypes for their version in later works.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Living Room – March 26, 2010

Living Room
94.1 KPFA
Berkeley, California
2010-03-26

LIVING ROOM Friday 26 March 2010 Healthcare eternal battle; Blended Nation. Healthcare insurance reform has passed—sort of; yet more hurdles continue to be erected. We look at reality. PLUS: the reality of race, as a blend, not an absolute. With host Kris Welch, noon to one.

Guests:

Ellen Shaffer, co-dir Center for Policy Analysis
Prof. Robt. Schapiro, Emory University School of Law
Enzo Pastore, health policy specialist, Progressive States Network
Michael Lighty, California Nurses Association

Mike Tauber, Pamela Singh, co-authors “Blended Nation: Portraits and Interviews of Mixed-Race America”

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

Dolly Fernandez: Growing up in a love-filled, mixed-race family in the anti-miscegenation era

The FilAm: A Magazine for Filipino Americans in New York
2015-11-20

Cristina DC Pastor, Founding Editor

“It was a scandal, but it was also a happy marriage. They just had so much fun together.”

Dolores ‘Dolly’ Fernandez, the daughter of a Filipino valet and a Norwegian hat check girl, traveled back in time and shared fond memories of her parents’ stirring romance amid anti-miscegenation laws which criminalized interracial marriages in the 1930s to the ‘60s.

The statute was applied mostly on ‘Negro-white’ marriages, but hanged over the heads of Filipino pioneers – or ‘manongs’ — in California, who worked in plantations farms. Some of them married outside the U.S. yet they could not be seen in public with their wives because of fear of the law – which was repealed in 1967– and fear of public humiliation. By that time, the seeds of racial prejudice had been planted on the Filipino consciousness.

Dolly recalled growing up in a mixed-race family in New York City during this era where the prevailing attitude around the country was to frown on any union of different races. Filipinos were referred to as Malays. Her father, Pio Fernandez of Baybay, Leyte, and mother, Agnes Olsen, got married, made a home in Astoria, Queens and filled it with love, music, and laughter…

Read the entire article here.