Mixed Race Studies

Mixed-Race Celebrities on Race, in their Own Words

Time Magazine: Healthland
2011-02-15

Meredith Melnick, Reporter and Producer

Who Are You?

If biracial and multiracial celebrities have anything in common, it is that they are often asked to explain themselves. That may sound familiar to any person of mixed ancestry for whom questions like “What are you?” and the slightly more delicate “Where are your parents from?” are the norm.

“Historically, racism is equated with segregation, separating people,” says Marcia Alesan Dawkins, a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. “In turn, we think racial progress is racial mixing. But the problem is, [that progress is] still based on appearance.”

People who embody racial diversity can’t be expected to explain the concept to everybody else, but their thoughts on the matter are often illuminating. As Dawkins said, “It’s still important to bring issues of multiracial identity to the public’s attention.”…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race students, interracial couples become norm as US diversifies

The Flor-Ala (Student newspaper of the University of North Alabama)
Florence, Alabama
2011-02-10

Lucy Berry, News Editor

When some people see UNA students Lauren Kirby and DeForrest Brown together in public, one of the first things they notice about the couple are their racial differences.

But the young duo, who met in 2009 and quickly formed a friendship after sharing a mutual love for music, rarely notice the fact that they are of separate races. Kirby, a Caucasian American, and Brown, an African American, have to remind themselves that they are an interracial couple.

“My father always told me when I was a kid that I could marry any man, no matter what color he is, as long as I was in love with him,” Kirby said. “I don’t worry about what other people around me think. I know there are people who probably don’t secretly approve of our relationship, but that’s their problem.”

The Pew Research Center reported in a 2008 analysis that one in seven new marriages in the United States is between spouses of different races or ethnicities…

…Though more mixed-race students are popping up around college campuses, many U.S. citizens still think of themselves in specific racial terms, making it difficult or impossible for some mixed-race young people to establish their own identity.

“I am who I am and have always been taught that,” said UNA student Lauren Davis, who comes a mixed African American and Cuban background. “There is no reason to ever be confused about who you are. You can be purple or polka dot, but your personality is not based on race.”

The influx of immigration and increasingly relaxed attitudes about interracial marriages have contributed to a more diverse America, but many citizens are skeptical about blending the races and believe it may lead to stratification among racial groups.

Dr. Gabriela Carrasco, assistant professor of psychology, said it’s common for people to classify others in modern society.

“We naturally categorize people and things cognitively, and even if we were to melt all of the races together, humans would probably still find a way to categorize something else,” she said. “I tell my students that categorization is not the negative. It is stereotypes, generalizations and the behaviors in which people act differently toward other groups that are the problem.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Coming MiscegeNation?

TruthDig
2011-02-13

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

It’s official. We’re a “miscegeNation.” The 2010 Census results are reminding us that multiracialism is not only our destiny but our reality. We’re seeing the rise of the most diverse cohort of youth in the nation’s history with a record low white population—the millennials. According to The New York Times, “Young Americans are far less white than older generations, a shift that demographers say creates a culture gap with far-reaching political and social consequences.”…

…Does today’s focus on multiracialism mean that we’re finally seeing the end of racism? Or does it mean that racism has simply gone underground?

The answer depends largely on talking and to whom we talk. Many would like to believe that our comfort with categorizing people as multiracial has erased racism and the stigma of interracial relations. Here is a perfect example: In defending herself and the tea party against the NAACP’s charges of racism, Sarah Palin calls on her own multiracial family as evidence in a Facebook post titled “The Charge of Racism: It’s Time to Bury the Divisive Politics of the Past”:…

…Translation: Multiracial families bestow the skill of racial reconciliation that will result in the end of racism. What is more, multiracial families can even promote the end of race. Palin is not the only one who expresses such views. The politically correct lip service that says that multiracial individuals and families are not racist and naturally racially progressive abounds in the press and blogosphere.

This sexy-but-flawed way of thinking is based totally on appearances. Because of our nation’s history of slavery, segregation and interment, racism is conflated with physical racial separation. As a consequence racial progress is conflated with racial mixing. Multiracial individuals and interracial families are touted as icons of racial healing because they are thought to have special insights based on what they are—mixed. In his 2008 “A More Perfect Union” speech, President Obama addressed how absurd this kind of thinking is. He said that his grandmother “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.” The president also implied that the idea of multiracials ending racism ignores the fact that interracial romantic relationships still experience higher rates of failure and divorce than same-sex relationships (i.e., his own parents’ divorce; Halle Berry’s and Gabriel Aubry’s custody battle over their daughter, Nahla).

If we still think that being multiracial or being part of a multiracial family automatically ends racism, then we must consider the cases of Lawrence Dennis and Leo Felton. Dennis, the multiracial right-wing fascist, was charged with sedition for allegedly seeking to establish a Nazi regime in the U.S. during World War II. Felton, a multiracial white supremacist, was convicted of bank robbery and plotting to blow up Jewish and African-American landmarks around Boston. The child of an interracial couple, Felton wrote a letter in which he criticized his parents and said he is “an unrepentant enemy of the multicultural myth.” Multiracial backgrounds did not encourage these men to become racial healers…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Matters: Mixed-race pupils discuss school and identity

Troubador Publishing
March 2011
128 pages
198×127 mm
ISBN: 9781848765719

Denise Williams

Mixed Matters responds to the dearth of literature about the experiences of mixed-race pupils in British schools. It seeks to examine how much credence schools should give to pupil identities when one parent is white British and the other is of black British/Caribbean heritage, as well as offering practical advice on how to improve the educational outcome of mixed-race children.

More often than not, mixed-race pupils are simply referred to as black and tend to be encompassed in a larger, more diverse group of black pupils, but the increased presence of mixed-race pupils in schools needs to focus the efforts of education professionals to address issues of race, ethnicity and culture.

Mixed Matters is essential reading for all educational professionals who want to get to grips with the issues that face mixed families and the pupils themselves as they share their personal experiences of what it is like to be them in the British schooling system. The young people featured in this book challenge some of the commonly held assumptions made about them – especially regarding their aspirations.

This book contains some resources that can be used to support work with mixed-race pupils as well as initial training and professional development of teachers. The book also details the approach of Mix-d, formerly the Multiple Heritage Project, in organising youth conferences and training youth facilitators of mixed-race to lead their peers in discussions about school and identity.

Room For Debate: The ‘Two or More Races’ Dilemma

The New York Times
2011-02-13

In Room for Debate, The New York Times invites knowledgeable outside contributors to discuss news events and other timely issues.

Introduction

An article in a Times series on the growing mixed-race population in the United States describes a debate over new Education Department rules for how schools from kindergarten through college count students by race and ethnicity. Students of mixed parentage who choose more than one race will be placed in a “two or more races” category.

But those identifying themselves as Hispanic will be reported only as Hispanic, regardless of their race. Some civil rights leaders and educators say that these new classifications will complicate efforts to track academic inequities and represent a step backward in addressing them.

Do the new federal requirements make sense? What are the possible pitfalls?

Debaters:

“Why Race Still Matters”
Anthony P. Carnevale, Research Professor and Director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce
Georgetown University

“‘Check One’ Didn’t Work”
Susan Graham, Executive Director
Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally)

“Identity and Demography”
Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor of Law
Harvard Law School

“The New Color Wheel”
Eric Liu
Author of The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker (1998)

“Racism and the Multiracial Label”
Rainier Spencer, Director and Professor of Afro-American Studies; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Author of Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix (2011)

“Take the Politics Out of Race”
Shelby Steele, Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow
Hoover Institution

“Race, Poverty and Educational Equity”
Gerald Torres, Professor of Law
University of Texas, Austin

…The change endangers the accurate monitoring of civil rights compliance in education. Despite the important gains of the civil rights movement, much discrimination still exists, albeit in less overt forms. Civil rights compliance monitoring—the use of racial statistics to uncover suspicious patterns in education, housing, employment, etc.—is our very best means of detecting covert and institutional discrimination. It is the reason for all those “check boxes” for racial identity that no one loves…

…People, including students, are not discriminated against on the basis of being mixed-race, but rather on the basis of being one part of that mixture The federal race categories, crude as they might be, allow us to track how people are treated based on how they are perceived by others. The dangerous result of the Education Department’s provision will be two-fold.

On one hand, the “two or more races” category will provide no useful data for compliance monitoring; while on the other, real racial discrimination against some students will go untracked by the compliance monitoring apparatus because students who check more than one box will not be placed in the categories that are in fact motivating their unjust treatment…

Rainier Spencer

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…But a new generation has arrived, more mixed than any before, and these young Americans are quite uninterested in seeking permission to sit in one of four or five colored boxes. Today’s multiracial Americans are at greater liberty to choose how they’d like to be seen, and under less pressure to pass for white.This is progress. At the same time, the blurring of race labels is neither the dawn of colorblindness nor the dusk of racism. Go to a place like Rio (or, for that matter, New Orleans), where people of many races mix, where there are many fine distinctions of shade—and where lighter is still usually seen as better.If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness – just a drop of it – does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America…Eric Liu

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…This conflation of race and ethnicity inevitably distorts the diagnosis of the unique educational problems of black Hispanics—or, worse yet, averages them into obsolescence. This is particularly harmful because false or partial diagnosis of any problem inevitably produces less effective policy responses…Anthony P. Carnevale

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…All children are worthy of recognition of their entire heritage. If we teach our children to tell the truth and then stand in the way of them doing that on school forms, we are missing the point. If accurate data are what we want, true identity of our students is what we must collect and reflect.We are not asking for a piece of the pie, but we need to be reflected on those data pie charts. Tracking the multiracial population is no less important than tracking any other group…Susan Graham

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…Categorizing and counting students by race still has relevance since blacks and Latinos continue to experience educational inequality as shown by achievement data and the resources available in the public schools they attend. Where poverty and race are linked these problems are compounded……The rise of multiracial identification stems from a resistance to obdurate historical racial categories and the reality that there are more children now with parents of different races. Do you erase part of who you are if you are forced to choose one race over another when you really feel like you are part of both? Do you diminish the political power of a historically oppressed group if you do not choose to make that group your primary identifier? And who gets to say who you are anyway?…Gerald Torres

Read the entire debate here.

Race, Sex and the Trials of a Young Explorer

The New York Times
2011-02-13

Richard Conniff

In 1859, Paul Du Chaillu, a young explorer of French origin and adopted American nationality, wandered out of the jungle after a four-year expedition in Gabon.  He brought with him complete specimens of 20 gorillas, an animal almost unknown outside West Africa.  The gorilla’s resemblance to humans astonished many people, especially after Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” later that year.  The politician Edwin M. Stanton was soon calling Abraham Lincoln “the original gorilla” and joking that Du Chaillu was a fool to have gone to Africa for what he could as easily have found in Springfield, Ill.

But the more common way to deal with our resemblance to monkeys and apes then was to fob it off onto other ethnic groups—typically black people, or sometimes the Irish.  A few white scientists even purported to find physiological evidence, in the configuration of the skull, for classifying other races as separate species, not quite as far removed as Caucasians from our primate cousins.  This undercurrent of scientific racism would play out to devastating effect in Du Chaillu’s own life.

When Du Chaillu arrived in London for the 1861 publication of his book, “Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa,” he became the most celebrated figure of the season, and then, overnight, the most notorious.  He was, by all accounts, a charismatic presence, about 30 years old, with a thick moustache, a prominent brow, and bright, flashing eyes.  He also had a gift for colorful lectures about hunting fierce animals and befriending cannibals…

…But as I was researching my book “The Species Seekers,” I kept coming across hints of an uglier motive for the attack on Du Chaillu, based on race. A merchant in Gabon made the cryptic assertion that he possessed “from reliable sources, information the most exact as to [Du Chaillu’s] antecedents.”  Others whispered, as The New York Times reported, that “the suspicion of negro sympathies hangs around him in many ways.”  Du Chaillu presented himself as a white man, born in Louisiana, and an almost compulsive awareness of race runs through his book:  “’You are the first white man that settled among us, and we love you,’” a village chieftain declares at one point.  “To which all the people answered, ‘Yes, we love him! He is our white man, and we have no other white man.’”

But the truth seems to be that his mother was a woman of mixed race, possibly a slave, on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, where his father had been a merchant and slaveholder.  Concealing this background, the historian Henry H. Bucher Jr. has written, was “an understandable choice during the heyday of scientific racism.” In fact, Du Chaillu’s expedition to Gabon had been sponsored by the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, then the center of scientific racism. (Samuel G. Morton kept a vast collection of skulls there, “the American Golgotha,” for the purpose of racial comparisons.) The “mysterious and rapid” end to Du Chaillu’s close association with the Academy in 1860 may have resulted, says Bucher, from “a committee member’s discovery of his maternal ancestry.”

A letter sent to an English friend in the thick of the Du Chaillu controversy supports this theory.  George Ord, an officer of the academy, wrote that some of his learned colleagues had taken note when Du Chaillu was in Philadelphia of “the conformation of his head, and his features” and detected “evidence of a spurious origin.”  Ord added:  “If it be a fact that he is a mongrel, or a mustee, as the mixed races are termed in the West Indies, then we may account for his wondrous narratives; for I have observed that it is a characteristic of the negro race, and their admixtures, to be affected to habits of romance.”…

…Curiously, the same issues of The Athenaeum in which the attack on Du Chaillu was playing out also featured a running plagiarism fight about a stage melodrama called “The Octoroon.”  It told the story of a dazzling New Orleans beauty “educated in every refinement and luxury” who was “almost a perfect white, her mother being a quadroon.”  In all three contesting versions of this tale, an “underhanded Yankee overseer” seeks to possess the heroine on the slave market.  And in each case, a dashing sea captain foils the nefarious plot and carries the beauty off to freedom.  Audiences apparently felt comfortable taking the heroine’s side because she was seven-eighths white.  But what if the sexes had been reversed, with a white woman falling for a mixed-race man—a man like Du Chaillu, say?…

Read the entire article here.

Neither Black nor White: The Saga of an American Family

The New World Africa Press
2006-03-03
252 pages
8.3 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
ISBN-10: 0976876124; ISBN-13: 978-0976876120

Joseph E. Holloway, Professor of Pan African Studies
California State University, Northridge

Historical novel, which traces the history of the Hadnot family from Gloucester, England in 1585 to New Orleans and the birth of Lucille Catherine (Celia) Hughes Hadnot the matriarch of six families that traced their descent from her. It is the true story of a black family, who were never enslaved, but owners of slaves. A tale about a people from indentured servitude, slavery, the Colfax riots, segregation and Jim Crow to Civil Rights. It is the story of a people who did not regard themselves as “neither black nor white.” It is a story of a family—one black and the other white. Both related sharing a common ancestor by the named John Hadnot. This novel by Joseph Holloway is compelling reading that explores black culture, history, Jim Crow and issues of colorism.

Hollywood’s Whiteout

The New York Times
2011-02-11

Manohla Dargis

A. O. Scott

CRAMMED into this year’s field of 10 best picture Oscar nominees are British aristocrats, Volvo-driving Los Angeles lesbians, a flock of swans, a gaggle of Harvard computer geeks, clans of Massachusetts fighters and Missouri meth dealers, as well as 19th-century bounty hunters, dream detectives and animated toys. It’s a fairly diverse selection in terms of genre, topic, sensibility, style and ambition. But it’s also more racially homogenous—more white—than the 10 films that were up for best picture in 1940, when Hattie McDaniel became the first black American to win an Oscar for her role as Mammy in “Gone With the Wind.” In view of recent history the whiteness of the 2011 Academy Awards is a little blinding.

Nine years ago, when Denzel Washington and Halle Berry won his and her Oscars—he was only the second African-American man to win best actor, and she was the first African-American woman to win best actress—each took a moment to look back at the performers from earlier generations who had struggled against prejudice and fought to claim the recognition too often denied them…

…What happened? Is 2010 an exception to a general rule of growing diversity? Or has Hollywood, a supposed bastion of liberalism so eager in 2008 to help Mr. Obama make it to the White House, slid back into its old, timid ways? Can it be that the president’s status as the most visible and powerful African-American man in the world has inaugurated a new era of racial confusion—or perhaps a crisis in representation? Mr. Obama’s complex, seemingly contradictory identity as both a man (black, white, mixed) and a politician (right, left, center) have inspired puzzlement among his supporters who want him to be one thing and detractors who fear that he might be something else.

In their modest way American movies helped pave the way for the Obama presidency by popularizing and normalizing positive images of black masculinity. Actors like Mr. Poitier and Harry Belafonte made the leap, allowing black men to move beyond porters and pimps to play detectives, judges, the guy next door, the God upstairs and the decider in the Oval Office. At the same time, while the variety of roles increased, the commercially circumscribed representational conservatism of American cinema—with its genre prerogatives and appetite for uplift, its insistence on archetypes and stereotypes, villains and heroes—meant that these images tended to fit rather than break or bend the mold. Certainly this isn’t a cinema that jibes with what, in his 2007 memoir “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama called “the fluid state of identity.”…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas [Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 92, Issue 3 (2005)
pages 974-975
DOI: 10.2307/3660015

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas. Ed. by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. xii, 329 pp. Cloth, isbn 0-252-02939-9. Paper, isbn 0-252-07194-8.)

Noting that free people of color never fully escaped the degrading effects of race-based slavery, David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine offer fourteen essays that explore women’s experiences of race, gender, and class in the slaveholding societies of the United States, the Caribbean, and South America. The book is divided into two sections, both of which contain rich information about enslaved as well as free women of color. The first section is organized around the conditions under which women achieved freedom; the second, around women’s economic and social adjustment to freedom. Key themes such as quality of freedom, economic status, and racial mixing are addressed in both sections…

…Virtually all the authors cite light skin and similar economic occupations as characteristic of free women of color. Félix V. Matos Rodréguez, for example, describes various food-selling establishments operated by free women of color, who made up the majority of street vendors in mid-nineteenth-century San Juan, Puerto Rico. In the United States as well, Loren Schweninger and Wilma King cite free women who earned their living as “laundresses, maids, seamstresses, cooks, midwives, venders, and servants” (p. 107) and a few who managed to own substantial property or small businesses.

Another common experience that connected the lives of free nonwhite women across national borders was the exploitive sexual system that permeated slave societies. Negative racial and gender stereotypes encouraged the rape and sexual degradation of relatively powerless enslaved and free women of color. There was another side to sexual exploitation, however. Many women of color manipulated the practice of concubinage (which often began with rape) to their advantage. Trevor Burnard tells the story of Phibbah, a Jamaican slave who gained social authority among slaves, profitable employment, property ownership, and ultimately freedom as a result of becoming the concubine of her powerful overseer. Virginia Meacham Gould similarly traces the freedom and prosperity of Henriette Delille of New Orleans, a proper Catholic Creole of color, to maternal African ancestors who escaped slavery on account of their descent from one of Louisiana’s wealthiest white colonists…

Read the entire review here.

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas

University of Illinois Press
2004
344 pages
6 x 9.25 in. 
Illustrations: 25 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-02939-4
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07194-2

Edited by

David Barry Gaspar, Professor of History
Duke University

Darlene Clark Hine, Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies and History
Northwestern University

Black women who were not slaves during the era of slavery

David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine’s Beyond Bondage outlines the restricted spheres within which free women of color, by virtue of gender and racial restrictions, were forced to carve out their existences. Although their freedom, represented by the acquisition of property, respectability, and opportunity, always remained precarious, the collection supports the surprising conclusion that women of color often sought and obtained these advantages more successfully than their male counterparts.