Mixed Race Studies

Fear of a Multiracial Planet: Loving’s Children and the Genocide of the White Race

Fordham Law Review
Volume 86, Issue 6 (2018)
pages 2761-2771

Reginald Oh, Professor of Law
Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland, Ohio

Part I analyzes the Loving decision striking down antimiscegenation laws and examines the segregationists’ justifications for antimiscegenation laws. Next, Part II explores the historical opposition of white segregationists to interracial marriages, families, and children and argues that the principle and practice of endogamy is a central feature of Jim Crow segregation. Finally, Part III examines the present ideology of white nationalism and shows that white nationalists oppose interracial unions and families for some of the same reasons that white segregationists opposed them. Specifically, white nationalists oppose interracial families because they are one of the main factors contributing to the so-called genocide of the white race.

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Malaise: Multiracial as a Legal Racial Category

Fordham Law Review
Volume 86, Issue 6 (2018)
pages 2783-2793

Taunya Lovell Banks, Jacob A. France Professor of Equality Jurisprudence
University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law

The focus of this Article is the underlying assumption of the Brookings Institution report that multiracial individuals constitute a separate racial category. My discussion of legal racial categories focuses only on government “racial” definitions. Multiracial individuals should enjoy the freedom to self-identify as they wish—and, like others, be afforded the protections of anti discrimination law. The question is whether a separate legal racial category is needed to provide that protection. Race in this country has been “crafted from the point of view of [white] race protection” protecting the interests of white Americans from usurpation by non whites and, unless the creation of a separate multiracial legal category advances this goal, change will be resisted. Commentaries grounded in Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause and federal statutory anti-discrimination jurisprudence shape the construction of racial categories in U.S. law. This jurisprudence influences the racial categories and definitions used for the census. The next Part briefly discusses the attempt to get a multiracial category on the U.S. census.

[R]ace is at once an empty category and a powerful instrument. —Melissa Nobles¹

Racism is about race: more races can lead . . . to changes in the way racism is presented, and ultimately to more, rather than less, racism. —Paulette M. Caldwell²

INTRODUCTION

The fiftieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia,³ which struck down Virginia’s antimiscegenation statute, provides an opportunity to reflect on Loving’s impact. A 2017 Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data found that interracial marriages constitute 17 percent of all marriages,⁴ which represents an increase of 14 percent since the U.S. Supreme Court decided Loving in 1967.⁵ One byproduct of the increase in interracial marriages is the growing number and prominence of multiracial children. For example, a July 2017 Brookings Institution report characterizes Barack Obama, born six years before Loving, as the person who gave growing “prominence” to the emergence of multiracial people in America.⁶

Increasingly, there is interest in the offspring of interracial unions and how they compare to monoracial individuals. The Brookings Institution, for example, reported that “there is no test score gap between white and multiracial high school students.”⁷ The report seems to define “multiracial” very narrowly as people with parents from different racialized groups.⁸ Yet the multiracial population in the United States is not a new phenomenon. By limiting multiracial “to first-generation children of interracial couples,”⁹ as others have, the report fails to acknowledge older and larger generations whose genealogical mixture is more distant. Many of the people within this older multiracial population are racially classified by government and custom as black or African American, and they constitute “around 40 [percent] of the total population.”¹⁰ In contrast, according to the 2000 census, firstgeneration multiracial individuals (including those with remote African ancestry) make up roughly 2 percent of the total population and are more likely to be seen as multiracial.¹¹

Proponents of a multiracial legal category complain that multiracial individuals are harmed by not being recognized under law as multiracial. Specifically, they argue that the law neither recognizes their personal identity nor protects their right to self-identify racially and to have that identity accepted.¹² Despite the long history of multiracial people in the United States, Fourteenth Amendment equal protection constitutional jurisprudence, statutory antidiscrimination laws, and the census do not formally recognize a separate multiracial category. Thus, the question is whether legal recognition is needed to remedy race-based discrimination experienced by multiracial individuals.¹³

Historically, courts grappling with racial-identity questions looked at three factors, phenotypical characteristics, ancestry, and racial reputation in the community, to resolve the issue.¹⁴ The courts relied on a binary classification system of white and nonwhite; the underlying issue in these cases being whether one party had any nonwhite ancestry. Thus, until recently, Barack Obama, despite his white mother, would be classified racially as black, since twentieth-century notions of race held that any known African ancestry made one black.¹⁵

Admittedly, since Loving, conventional notions of race in the United States have “destabilized” as a result of “increases in immigration, intermarriage, and cross-racial adoptions.”¹⁶ Reflecting the era of racial self-identification,¹⁷ racial categories are more fluid in the twenty-first century, even for people who, historically, racially classified as black. These attitudinal changes are reflected in a 2007 Pew Research Center finding that “[n]early four-in-ten African Americans (37%) say that blacks can no longer be thought of as a single race” because of increasing diversity within that community.¹⁸

Conventional blackness, where one is “black” if one’s African ancestry is visible or known,¹⁹ is on the wane. As critical race theory legal scholar Neil Gotanda posits, race—particularly the racial category “black”—while a consistent and constant “social divider,” is not a “stable, coherent legal and social concept.”²⁰ Today, people with some African ancestry may move away from blackness and, in some respects, the legal multiracial category movement is an example.²¹

The focus of this Article is the underlying assumption of the Brookings Institution report that multiracial individuals constitute a separate racial category. My discussion of legal racial categories focuses only on government “racial” definitions. Multiracial individuals should enjoy the freedom to self-identify as they wish—and, like others, be afforded the protections of antidiscrimination law. The question is whether a separate legal racial category is needed to provide that protection. Race in this country has been “crafted from the point of view of [white] race protection”²²— protecting the interests of white Americans from usurpation by nonwhites and, unless the creation of a separate multiracial legal category advances this goal, change will be resisted.

Commentaries grounded in Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause and federal statutory antidiscrimination jurisprudence shape the construction of racial categories in U.S. law. This jurisprudence influences the racial categories and definitions used for the census. The next Part briefly discusses the attempt to get a multiracial category on the U.S. census…

Read the entire article here.

We’re in planning mode for the 2019 Midwest Mixed Conference!

2019 Midwest Mixed Conference: Disrupting the Single Story
First Universalist Church
3400 Dupont Ave South
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55408
2019-07-12 through 2019-07-14

We’re always looking for amazing people to join our team! Whether it’s a few moments of your time or dedicating a day to volunteer at our 2019 Conference, we appreciate all the help we can get.

For more information, click here.

The Prism of Race: The Politics and Ideology of Affirmative Action in Brazil

University of Michigan Press
2018
272 pages
2 tables
6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-472-13084-9
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-472-12389-6
DOI: 10.3998/mpub.9736376

David Lehmann, Emeritus Reader in Social Science
Cambridge University

Foreword by:

Antonio Sergio Guimarães, Senior Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

Brazil has developed a distinctive response to the injustices inflicted by the country’s race relations regime. Despite the mixed racial background of most Brazilians, the state recognizes people’s racial classification according to a simple official scheme in which those self-assigned as black, together with “brown” and “indigenous” (preto-pardo-indigena), can qualify for specially allocated resources, most controversially quota places at public universities. Although this quota system has been somewhat successful, many other issues that disproportionately affect the country’s black population remain unresolved, and systemic policies to reduce structural inequality remain off the agenda.

In The Prism of Race, David Lehmann explores, theoretically and practically, issues of race, the state, social movements, and civil society, and then goes beyond these themes to ask whether Brazilian politics will forever circumvent the severe problems facing the society by co-optation and by tinkering with unjust structures. Lehmann disrupts the paradigm of current scholarly thought on Brazil, placing affirmative action disputes in their political and class context, bringing back the concept of state corporatism, and questioning the strength and independence of Brazilian civil society.

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. After Durban
• 3. Classification Wars
• 4. Race, Class, and Education in the Search for Social Justice
• 5. The Movimento Negro between State, Civil Society, and Market
• 6. The Campaign and Theories of Social Movements
• Appendix A: Selected Indicators on the Growth of the Brazilian Higher Education System (2003–2014)
• Appendix B: Interviews Carried Out between 2008 and 2014
• Glossary
• Footnotes
• Bibliography
• Index

Black Sheep Boy

Rare Bird Books
2016
208 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1942600374
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1947856066

Martin Pousson

• PEN Center USA Fiction Award Winner
• National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Winner
• Simpson Family Literary Prize Finalist
• Los Angeles Times Literary Pick
• NPR: The Reading Life Featured Book
• The Millions Best Summer Horror Selection
• Book Riot Must-Read Indie Press Book
• On Top Down Under Book of the Year Finalist
• Best Gay Fiction Selection
• Best Gay Speculative Fiction Selection

Meet Boo, a wild-hearted boy from the bayou land of Louisiana. Misfit, outcast, loner. Call him anything but a victim. Sissy, fairy, Jenny Woman. Son of a mixed-race Holy Ghost mother and a Cajun French phantom father. In a series of tough and tender stories, he encounters gender outlaws, drag queen renegades, and a rogues gallery of sex-starved priests, perverted teachers, and murderous bar owners. To escape his haunted history, Boo must shed his old skin and make a new self. As he does, his story rises from dark and murk, from moss and mud, to reach a new light and a new brand of fairy tale. Cajun legends, queer fantasies, and universal myths converge into a powerful work of counter-realism. Black Sheep Boy is a song of passion and a novel of defiance.

Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love

Copper Canyon Press
2019-05-21
80 pages
5.9 x 0.3 x 8.9 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-1556595615

Keith S. Wilson, Poet, Editor, Game Designer

Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love is a collection whose poems approach family, politics, and romance, often through the lens of space: the vagaries of a relationship full of wonder and coldness, separation and exploration. There is the sense of the speaker as a cartographer of familiar spaces, of land he has never left or relationships that have stayed with him for years, and always with the newness of an alien or stranger. Acutely attuned to the heritage of Greco-Roman myth, Wilson writes through characters such as the Basilisk and the Minotaur, emphasizing the intense loneliness these characters experience from their uniqueness. For the racially ambiguous speaker of these poems, who is both black and not black, who has lived between the American South and the Midwest, there are no easy answers. From the fields of Kentucky to the pigeon coops of Chicago, identities and locations blur―the pastoral bleeds into the Afrofuturist, black into white and back again.

“Additionally, because I pass as a white Jew, I am able to walk into communal spaces and challenge some of the assumptions of who the Jewish community insiders are. My very existence often breaks down stereotypes of who we imagine to be a committed or engaged Jew.” —Tema Smith

Ruth Abusch-Magder, “Three Things the Jewish Community Can Do Better, According to a Mixed-Race Jewish Professional,” My Jewish Learning, May 23, 2018. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/jewish-and/three-things-the-jewish-community-can-do-better-according-to-a-mixed-race-jewish-professional/.

Yet government’s ambivalence towards the “brown babies” remained. The children were not white and therefore not truly “British”, since Britishness assumed whiteness. In addition, a mixed-race GI baby stood out as a visual marker of the black soldier having indeed, as the comedian Tommy Trinder was well-known for quipping, been “over-paid, over-fed, over-sexed and over-here”.

Lucy Bland, “Thousands of mixed-race British babies were born in World War II – and adoption by their black American fathers was blocked,” The Conversation, May 16, 2019. https://theconversation.com/thousands-of-mixed-race-british-babies-were-born-in-world-war-ii-and-adoption-by-their-black-american-fathers-was-blocked-116790.

I’m Darker Than My Daughter. Here’s Why It Matters.

NYT Parenting
The New York Times
2019-05-21

Norma Newton

Norma Newton and her daughter at their home in Los Angeles. Carolina Adame

Breaching colorism with my little girl sent me reeling back into my childhood shame.

Our bedtime routine that night started off like so many others, harried but mostly sweet. After making our way through brushing teeth and getting into pajamas, my daughter and I lay down on her bedroom floor to sing songs, the final step before crawling into bed.

When I tried to curl up next to my 4-year-old, though, I sensed her hesitation. She wiggled her little body away from mine each time I inched closer. “Do you not want mommy close to you, sweetie?” I asked, assuming she was initiating a game to extend our nighttime ritual. Her light-brown eyes locked in on me as she brushed her honey-colored locks aside with her hand.

In a casual on-the-edge-of-sleep voice she cooed, “Your skin is dark. I don’t want you to touch me.”

My brown Indigenous Latina body stiffened; I labored to breathe, outraged and confused. She rendered me speechless…

Read the entire article here.

Three Things the Jewish Community Can Do Better, According to a Mixed-Race Jewish Professional

My Jewish Learning
2018-05-23

Ruth Abusch-Magder, Education Director and Rabbi-in-Residence
Be’chol Lashon

Tema Smith

Tema Smith’s own experiences as a mixed race person shape her vision as a Jewish professional.

Tema Smith is often mistaken for white, but this mixed-race Jew is proud of both her Bahamian and Ashkenazi roots. She is also one of a growing number of Jews of color who are making careers in the Jewish world. We met up with Smith to learn about her professional life and personal experience and to hear what advice she has for Jewish institutions.

Be’chol Lashon: Tell us about your job.

Smith: I am the Director of Community Engagement at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, Canada’s largest Reform congregation. Not only do I ensure that the basics of synagogue life, like becoming a member and connecting with the community, are smooth, but it is also my responsibility to keep the door wide open for prospective members. It also includes creating partnerships in the community and making connections more broadly…

…Be’chol Lashon: Does being mixed-race play into the work you do at Holy Blossom?

Smith: Being mixed-race has always given me a broader perspective on the work I do. I came into this work as someone who had only been an observer, and not as someone who grew up in the Jewish community, which has made me attuned to the experiences of those who are new to the community. As I mentioned before, the fact that we were not part of Toronto’s Jewish community had a lot to do with our family’s racial makeup. This makes me especially aware of the barriers to participation that people face and pushes me to work harder on inclusion, which is what we need to do to ensure the Jewish future as the demographics shift and we become more multicultural and multiracial. I find that my position as both an insider and outsider to Jewish life lets people open up to me. I am upfront about my identity, coming from both an interfaith and an interracial family. Because of that, I’ve noticed that it is not uncommon for people to share information about their lives that they are not sure the synagogue would welcome knowing, like their own faith journey or lack of observance.

Additionally, because I pass as a white Jew, I am able to walk into communal spaces and challenge some of the assumptions of who the Jewish community insiders are. My very existence often breaks down stereotypes of who we imagine to be a committed or engaged Jew…

Read the entire interview here.