Mixed Race Studies

Choosing to be Multiracial in America: The Sociopolitical Implications of the “Check All That Apply” Approach to Race in the 2000 U.S. Census

Berkeley La Raza Law Journal
Volume 21 (2011)

Alaina R. Walker

I. INTRODUCTION

Race in America has long been a contentious subject, especially when the government has been involved. Race can mean something different to everyone, and yet, it is widely understood as having real implications and consequences. Many scholars understand that race is “a social construct[:] a social artifact, which results from a process through which social significance is attributed to some contingent attributes like skin color, and whose emergence, salience and influence can be studied and analyzed.” The government’s use of race has ranged from the horrific to the admirable, but has always been controversial. Analyzing the U.S. Census provides an interesting opportunity to discuss some of the significant roles race has played and continues to play in America. Racial data collected from the U.S. Census is currently used for the controversial purpose of furthering civil rights objectives, but some people worry that these objectives are now in danger. Due to the implementation of the “check all that apply” approach to the U.S. Census (the ability to select all races with which one identifies), critics are concerned that racial data will become convoluted and that civil rights objectives will be hindered. What is lacking from the conversation and arguably the civil rights agenda is the importance of the official recognition of multiracial identity, which the “check all that apply” approach acknowledges.

Although multiracial identity should be recognized on the U.S. Census, it is necessary to analyze how its recognition in the form of the “check all that apply”…

Read the entire article here.

Phil Wilkes Fixico to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #225-Phil Wilkes Fixico
When: Wednesday, 2011-09-14, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 16:00 CDT, 14:00 PDT)

Phil Wilkes Fixico, Seminole Maroon Descendant, Creek and Cherokee Freedmen Descendant

From “Mixed Race in the Seminole Nation,” in Ethnohistory, Volume 58, Number 1 (Winter 2011):

This is a story of two hidden identities. It focuses on the family history of Phil Wilkes Fixico (aka Philip Vincent Wilkes and Pompey Bruner Fixico), a contemporary Seminole maroon descendant of mixed race who lives in Los Angeles. Phil is one-eighth Seminole Indian, one-quarter Seminole freedman, one-eighth Creek freedman, one-quarter Cherokee-freedman, and one-quarter African-American-white. His family history records that his paternal grandfather was the offspring of a Seminole Indian woman and a Seminole freedman, but that this “intermarriage” was kept secret from the Dawes Commission and the boy was enrolled as a “fullblood” Indian. This one union and the subsequent history of the family tell us a great deal about relations between Seminoles and freedmen in the Indian Territory and Oklahoma and about status and identity issues among individuals of mixed race within American society. With tragic irony, Phil’s parents also hid the identity of his biological father, echoing the story of his grandfather. Sensing family secrets and lies, young Phil experienced an identity crisis. Eventually discovering his father’s identity and his family history, Phil turned his life around. He has embraced his mixed-race heritage, connected with the Seminole maroon communities in Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico, and become a creative and energetic tribal historian.

Selected Articles about Phil Wilkes Fixico

• Manny Otiko, “Blacks and Native Americans have deep ties,” Our Weekly: Our Truth, Our Voice, November 18, 2010.
• Darlene Donloe, “Phil Wilkes Fixico—a True Native Son,” L.A. Watts Times, March 11, 2010.
• Kevin Mulroy, “Mixed Race in the Seminole Nation,” Ethnohistory, Volume 58, Number 1 (Winter 2011).

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

Obama’s ascent to the (still) White House is part and parcel of forty years of transition from the Jim Crow order to a new racial regime. Obama represents the sedimentation of a higher stage of the “new racism,” one described by Dylan E. Rodríguez as a “multiracial white supremacy.” In the new phase of racial regulation, the old sins—imperialism, neoliberal capitalism, and the racial order—work best in blackface.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Chats: Is Obama Black, Bi-racial, or Post-racial?” Zócalo Public Square, September 7, 2011. http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/09/07/is-obama-black-bi-racial-or-post-racial/read/chats/

Family Histories of ‘Passing’ from Black to White Documented in Book

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
2011-09-06

Katti Gray

In the summer of 1993, as American-born Daniel Sharfstein registered Blacks to cast their first ballot in race-riven South Africa, he volunteered alongside a South African woman, who professed to be as authentically African as any other Black. This, she told then college student Sharfstein, despite her family’s decades-old designation as Coloured, a mixed-race label that elevated her clan above Blacks in the old White-run government’s hierarchy of peoples.
 
Though being Coloured insulated her from brutalities apartheid reserved for the so-called purely Black, she was, physically, hard to distinguish from the Black activists who had dominated the anti-apartheid movement, said Dr. Sharfstein, now 38 and a Vanderbilt University law professor. She was dark-skinned, and wore her hair Afrocentrically-braided.
 
That her family would choose to be misclassified racially was both fascinating and bewildering, Sharfstein said. “I came home and was immediately interested in the question of whether the same thing had happened here,” said Sharfstein, who holds a law degree from Yale, and a degree in history, literature and Afro-American studies from Harvard.
 
His book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, is the outgrowth of parallels Sharfstein drew between apartheid’s racial distortions and those of his own native land.
 
With this nation’s state-by-state variations on how many drops of Black blood legally made a person Black as both a backdrop and core of the 395-page tome, Sharfstein explores the human, financial and ephemeral costs of morphing from an imposed Blackness—notwithstanding one’s light skin, aquiline facial features and straight hair—to live as White…

…Cape Cod, Mass., is where Isabel Wall Whittemore’s forebears ended up.
 
“Until I read [Sharfstein’s] book, I didn’t realize that, in my mom’s day, 1/16 [of Black blood] was considered Colored,” said Whittemore, 74, now residing in Hickory Flat, Miss., with her oldest daughter Lisa Colby. “To tell you the truth… I’ve always gone as Caucasian. I had no reason not to. I’d love to know what I should be calling myself now, but it doesn’t matter to me either way… Race isn’t important.”
 
Roughly a decade before the February 2011 release of Sharfstein’s book, a homework assignment for Colby’s daughter revealed their place on the branches of O.S.B. Wall’s family tree. “I’ve met a lot of cousins who I didn’t know,” Colby said. “I, myself, think this is great … in terms of the history. My great, great-grandfather was able to come up from being a slave to being a lawyer.”
 
Not everyone who’s learned of their ties to Wall has been so effusive. One informed Sharfstein that “he’d become more racist since learning about his descent than ever before,” Sharfstein said. “Initially, he was so intent on maintaining his White identity—and nothing makes you more ‘White’ than hating Black people. That’s my inference.”…

Read the entire article here.

I say let him [Barack Obama] do his best to run the country, like any President, and the rest of us can do him a favor by not constantly debating how black he is or isn’t. Enough already. He’s the President, for Christ’s sake. Let him do his job.

David A. Hollinger, “Chats: Is Obama Black, Bi-racial, or Post-racial?” Zócalo Public Square, September 7, 2011. http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/09/07/is-obama-black-bi-racial-or-post-racial/read/chats/

Culture: The face in the mirror is mestizo

San Antonio Current
San Antonia, Texas
2006-02-22

Elaine Wolff, Current Editor
Plaza de Armas

A two-day roundtable takes a big eraser to identity lines

“I’m looking for the mestizo eye, the mestizo subjunctive, the mestizo soul,” says author John Phillip Santos as we wander through Retratos: 2,000 Years of Latin-American Portraiture at the San Antonio Museum of Art. He pauses before “Retrato de un Matrimonio,” by 19th-century painter Hermenegildo Bustos. Husband and wife have light brown eyes and dark brown hair, but where she is decidedly European in appearance, with pale skin and delicate features, his ancestry seems more indigenous: broad cheekbones and a chiseled nose. The work reflects “mestizo compassion,” suggests Santos.
 
“Compassion” is not a concept frequently associated with “mestizo,” a word that has spent much of its 600-odd-year history wielded as either a derogatory description for the children of European and Native American unions, or as a battle cry in the Chicano identity movement.

Circa 1523, in a creation myth that is equal parts fact and mystery, La Malinche—the mysterious Mexican Pocahontas—and Hernán Cortés founded the mestizo race with their first-born son, Martin Cortés, who would return to Spain with his father to further serve the aims of colonial-era Europe. Mexican and Chicano ambivalence over the legacy of La Malinche illustrates the problem with fully embracing mestizo identity: It means embracing the white conqueror father as well as the subjugated, but re-ascendant, indigenous mother. While La Malinche is celebrated by some as the mother of the Mexican people, she is alternatively known as La Chingada—the fucked.

In a sense, embracing the Virgen de Guadalupe—a mestiza Virgin Mary—is embracing an alternative mestizo birth, a virgin who conceived a new race without being defiled by the “other.”
 
But for Santos and an increasing number of Latino scholars, mestizo is the face of an optimistic future. “We are all mestizo. Our heritage is global. It quarrels with borders; it quarrels with demarcations,” he says, echoing his mentor, Virgilio Elizondo, the San Antonio priest who wrote The Future is Mestizo in 1986. Elizondo and Santos are two members of the organizing committee for the “Revealing Retratos,” Taller Popular, a private, two-day conference that will be held this weekend at SAMA and Trinity University, and includes such participants as Henry Estrada of the Smithsonian Latino Center, author and artist Ito Romo, Sandra Cisneros, and Graciela Sanchez of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. A public conference will follow April 22 at SAMA…

Read the entire article here.

Fatal Invention: Race and Science

The Brian Lehrer Show
WNYC
Monday, 2011-08-15

Brian Lehrer, Host

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Dorothy Roberts, Kirkland & Ellis professor and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, and author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Re-create Race In the Twenty-First Century, discusses how the findings of the Human Genome Project a decade ago stands in contrast to racial definitions in medicine and technology.

Download the audio here (00:13:04).

Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities [Review: DaCosta]

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews
Volume 40, Number 5 (September 2011)
pages 571-572
DOI: 10.1177/0094306111419111i

Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Associate Professor
Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University

Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities, by Sultana Choudhry. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. 219 pp. cloth. ISBN: 9780754678601.

Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities is a study of identity choices among South Asian/white individuals in the United Kingdom. The term “South Asian” refers here to peoples with ancestry from the Indian subcontinent, including India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Sultana Choudhry situates her study primarily in the social psychology literature and in the growing body of social science literature on mixed race or, to use the author’s preferred term, “interethnic” people in the Anglophone world. In focusing on South Asian/white interethnics, the author begins to fill a gap in both literatures. She rightly points out that there is a relative dearth of research on South Asian/white interethnics in Britain, despite the fact that they comprise a substantial proportion of interethnics in a society in which interethnic births are on the rise.

This is a multi-method study, incorporating semi-structured interviews, discourse analysis, retrospective diary accounts of factors that influenced respondents’ ethnic identity choices and a survey of 87 interethnics of a variety of ethnoracial combinations. While the majority of respondents were interethnic, some phases of the study include monoethnic respondents, including some parents of the interethnic respondents.

While I applaud this use…

Purchase or purchase the review here.

Whoa, We Have a Black President

Zócalo: Public Square
2011-09-08

Randall Kennedy Assesses Obama’s Triumphs—and Shortcomings—In Erasing the Color Line

Randall Kennedy, Harvard professor of law and author of The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, had an assignment: to answer whether or not Obama has been erasing the color line. “By color line,” explained Kennedy, “I mean all of the sentiments, instincts, habits of mind, structures that wrongly stymie people because of race. Is Obama erasing that baleful aspect of political culture?”
 
In a word, said Kennedy, yes. But there was a caveat: the “Obama way” is to avoiding talking about race at every turn.
 
According to Kennedy, Obama’s most impressive feat was to treat making it to the White House as a realistic, tenable option. His legacy, Kennedy believes, will be the alteration of public psychology to a place of normalizing a black presidency. After four years, people will have accepted seeing a black man enter and exit Air Force One.
 
“It was so audacious because of the history of the U.S.,” he said.
 
As Kennedy reminded the audience, a crowd of a few hundred gathered in an auditorium in the Hammer Museum, African-Americans were largely excluded from politics until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. “Blacks were excluded by dint of terror throughout the deep South, excluded by dint of various legal shenanigans,” Kennedy said….

…Kennedy’s own criticisms of Obama only came up in the question-and-answer portion of the evening. Kennedy said he believes that Obama didn’t actively do enough to change the ideological landscape of the country and that he was sheepish about outwardly supporting liberal judges. Kennedy was most critical of Obama’s stances surrounding gay rights, finding it ironic that when Obama’s parents married across racial boundaries it was considered a felony in many places. Now Obama is pushing a “separate but equal” equivalent in the gay community…

Read the entire article here.
Watch the video and/or listen to the audio here.

The Concept of Post-Racial: How Its Easy Dismissal Obscures Important Questions

Dædalus
Volume 140, Issue 1 (Winter 2011 – Race in the Age of Obama, volume 1)
pages 174–182
DOI: 10.1162/DAED_a_00069