Mixed Race Studies

2010 Census: Think Twice, Check Once

The Huffington Post
2010-03-08

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate
Stanford University

The federal government is taking a road trip, dubbed the 2010 Census Portrait of America Road Tour, to try to convince “hard-to-count audiences” to participate in this year’s dicennial Census. One of those particularly hard-to-count groups are those who identify as racially mixed. Many will choose to take advantage of the “mark one or more races” (MOOM) option made first available on the 2000 Census. Race scholars have been hotly debating the significance of this paradigm shift, asking: just what are the Civil Rights consequences of the Census option of “mark one or more races”?

Demonized in the early twentieth century as sexually polluting and culturally degenerate, mixed race people are now all the rage. The New York Times hails them as Generation E.A.: Ethnically Ambiguous and celebrates them as ambassadors to the post-race new world order. With Obama, our self-described “mutt” President, as its poster-child, the “the Mulatto Millennium” is finally upon us…

…Few could have anticipated the community impact of their box-checking. Federal guidelines have since sought to correct for these unexpected effects, but my point is that the government accounting of race through the Census is explicitly designed to inform public policy and the distribution of resources. This is not about ethnic squabbling over spoils.

It is a recognition that the Census was never meant as–nor should it be–a site for self-expression…

Read the entire article here.

Integrating Multiple Identities: Multiracials and Asian-Americans in the United States (Review Essay)

Canadian Journal of Sociology
Volume 33, Number 2 (2008)
pages 397-403

Wendy D. Roth, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of British Columbia, Canada

Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, 280pp., paper (978-0-8047-5546-7), hardcover (978-0-8047-5545-0).

Pawan Dhingra, Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, 328 pp., paper (978-0-8047-5578-8), hardcover (978-0-8047-5577-1).

As the sociological literature has shifted away from a primordial view of race and ethnicity as fixed identities, research has emphasized not only their fluid and changing nature, but also how individuals maintain and negotiate multiple identities. It was not so long ago that ethnic and — especially — racial identities were seen as exclusive: a person could only have one. Today we recognize that people can identify as both White and Black, as both Chinese and Canadian, or that they can create new identities that combine yet are different from any of their constituent parts (e.g., a “Canadian-Born Chinese” identity that is neither Canadian nor Chinese).

Kimberly McClain DaCosta and Pawan Dhingra both take up the question of how people create and legitimize new identities that blend together different, and sometimes conflicting, cultures or sets of meaning. DaCosta focuses on the construction of “multiracial” as a social category and mode of identification, particularly how the family, marketing, and the state contribute to this construction. Dhingra illustrates how professional second-generation Korean-Americans and Indian-Americans in Dallas live out the hybridity they experience on both sides of their hyphen. His groups work in the mainstream economy, allowing them to balance their ethnic and American selves. DaCosta’s book is ultimately a more satisfying contribution, but both works offer valuable illustrations of how groups resist pressures to sublimate one identity into another, and thereby integrate multiple identities into a more complex whole…

Read the entire book review here.

The End of the One-Drop Rule? Labeling of Multiracial Children in Black Intermarriages

Sociological Forum
Volume 20, Number 1 (March, 2005)
pages 35-67
Print ISSN: 0884-8971, Online ISSN: 1573-7861
DOI: 10.1007/s11206-005-1897-0

Wendy D. Roth, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of British Columbia, Canada

The identity choices of multiracial individuals with Black heritage have traditionally been limited in America by the one-drop rule, which automatically designated them as Black. This paper evaluates the rules contemporary influence and argues that, with increasing interracial marriage, options in racial identification are now available to this group. Using the 5% 1990 and 2000 Public Use Microdata Samples, I consider how children from Black intermarriages are racially identified by their families and, using 2000 data, evaluate theoretical hypotheses to explain identification processes. The results show that most families with Black intermarriages reject the one-drop rule, but that Black–White families create unique interracial options, the implications of which are considered.

Read or purchase the article here.

Fixing the Color Line: The Mulatto, Southern Courts, and Racial Identity

American Quarterly
Volume 53, Number 3 (September 2001)
pages 420-451
E-ISSN: 1080-6490
Print ISSN: 0003-0678
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2001.0033

Teresa Zackodnik, Professor of English
University of Alberta, Canada

In July 1857 Abby Guy sued for her freedom and that of her four children in an Arkansas court. The court records state that Abby Guy had been supporting herself and her children by farming and selling her own crops. The Guy family “passed as free persons”: Abby’s oldest daughter “boarded out” so that she could attend school, and the family “visited among white folks, and went to church, parties, etc.,–[such that one] should suppose they were white.”  Following these accounts of where and how the Guys lived, the court required that the family be presented for physical inspection by the jury, which was to base its decision of whether Abby Guy and her children were black or white, slave or free, on their appearance as well as on any testimony offered: “Here the plaintiffs were personally presented in Court, and the judge informed the jury that they… should treat their… inspection of plaintiffs’ persons as evidence.”  Following their evidentiary “inspection” of the Guy family, the jury was told that the Guys had lived as “free persons” in Arkansas since 1844. In 1855 they moved to Louisiana where a Mr. Daniel “took possession of them as slaves” roughly two years later, claiming that Abby Guy “came with . . . [him] from Alabama to Arkansas” as his slave.  Witnesses for Daniel testified that Abby’s mother, Polly, was said to have been “a shade darker than Abby,” such that they “could not say whether Polly was of African or Indian extraction.”…

Read or purchase the article here.

Mapping Race through Admixture

The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society
Volume 4, Issue 4 (2008)
pages 79-84

Catherine Bliss, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Race and Science Studies
Department of Africana Studies
Brown University

Mapping Admixture Linkage Disequilibrium (MALD) is a technology that separates genomic ancestral lineages to identify disease genes. In the U.S., where a significant segment of the population has unknown ancestral origins, researchers use MALD to tease out continental haplotypes and (re)assign ancestry to disease samples. While MALD is fast-becoming a primary medical genetic technology, its publicly known uses lie in the service fields of recreational DNA genealogy and forensic profiling. Here, private companies use MALD to tell clients where their ancestors likely came from or to advise law enforcement on what kind of racially-defined features to look for in a suspect. This paper looks at the practical assemblage of MALD applications and its effects in defining ancestry in terms of race. Through this assemblage, society produces the genome as racial and race as genetic. Moreover, identity is refashioned through a genomic knowledge of self.

Purchase the article here.

Researching Mixed Heritage: Professors Study Racial Identification Questions

inside
California State University, Fullerton
2009-11-02

Mikel Hogan, Anthropologist, Chair and Professor of Human Services
California State University, Fullerton

H. Rika Houston, Professor of Marketing
California State University, Los Angeles

Although racial identification has been a part of the U.S. Census policy since its inception, neither race nor ethnicity is a scientific construct. Quite the contrary.

Few factors are more telling of sociopolitical fluidity than the shifting labels that mark the practice of U.S. Census reporting over time. For example, the original U.S. Census in 1790 had only three racial categories: free whites (divided by gender), slaves (blacks), and all other free persons (Indians).  Every census since then has posed the question of race, but the racial categories employed have been added, dropped and revised based upon the prevailing social and political climate of the time.

By 1890, the census categories had expanded to white, black, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, Chinese, Japanese and Indian to reflect the multiracial legacy of slavery and the recent influx of early Chinese and Japanese immigrants. To complicate matters further, “Hispanic” was added as an ethnic category in 1970 even though a person of Hispanic origin can be of any race. To this day, the Hispanic category maintains the distinction of being the only ethnic category explicitly tracked by the census even though ethnicity is a social construct that can be arguably claimed, albeit arbitrarily, by any person…

Read the entire article here.

Passing as Mixed Race

Open Salon
2010-03-03

Marcia Dawkins, Assistant Professor of Human Communication
California State University, Fullerton

Alexandre Dumas has always been one of my favorite writers. Works like The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo and Georges took me on countless adventures in worlds and times much different from my own. But there’s a kinship I’ve always felt with the author despite our differences in gender, nationality and history—being of mixed race. Dumas was the grandson of a freed Haitian slave and a French nobleman. When describing his racial profile to a man who insulted him for being different he’s reported to have said, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.” Though my own background is different from Dumas’s, and feels even more complex, that multiracial kinship is one of the reasons why I look forward to the U.S. release of the new biopic that opened in Paris on February 10th, L’Autre Dumas, or The Other Dumas…

Read the entire article here.

Changing the stereotypes

The Daily
University of Washington
2010-02-25

Kristen Steenbeeke

Sophomores Gabbie Duncalf and Fitsum Misgano were taking a class about mixed race when they first learned about the organization Mixed.

After hearing that the group — which caters specifically to mixed-race students but is open to anyone — was lacking officers, they decided to join during spring quarter of last year. Since then, the club has been an outlet for them to discuss mixed-race topics as well as an opportunity to spend time with other students who identify as mixed.

“As a mixed person, I have always felt hesitant to join monoracial organizations,” said Duncalf, whose mother is Filipino and father is Caucasian. “I feel different, and I don’t know if I fit in there, so I like that with Mixed, I can talk about race in different ways … I can talk to people who feel the same way and who want to change the way we talk about race.”

Discussions about new perceptions of race are important, not only among students but in society as a whole. Ralina Joseph, a communications professor at the UW, has made it her goal to change the way we talk about race, especially by disregarding the idea that multiracialism is a separate entity and using it to “deconstruct notions of race.”

“I think that I would encourage multiracial students to not only identify themselves with a multiracial group, but also to see themselves as a part of their larger racial and ethnic communities,” Joseph said…

Read the entire article here.

Barack Obama’s rise marks America’s first multiracial decade

Yahoo News
2009-12-09

Thomas Kelley

Everyone has a day of awakening when it comes to race. For me, it was a cool September day when I was eight years old. My family had recently moved to Colorado from Tennessee and like any child starting a new school, I was nervous. In the administrator’s office, my mother and I waited to go over my files. Nearby was another family—a white mother and a black father with their son and daughter. They were also arriving for their first day and the boy was around my age.

To my surprise, my mother turned to me and quietly told me she was worried for the children. We were living in a predominantly white suburb and she later explained to me that being black in our society was hard enough, but being half black, half white, was even harder. There was greater potential for rejection from both sides of the racial divide. Because of this, she wondered if entering a black-white relationship was always fair to the kids. In some ways, I understood my mother’s reservations, but I was also astonished. The simple reason why is because I’m biracial too, half Asian and half white.

That was more than 25 years ago. Today, the multiracial American has become an undeniable fact of life in the 21st century. From the actress Jessica Alba to the trend-scriber Malcolm Gladwell to the Olympic champion Apolo Anton Ohno, many multiracial Americans have reached superstar status in the last decade. And the biggest phenomenon of them all is President Barack Obama.

This isn’t a new story…

…“I think that President Obama has been trying, with really remarkable skill, to get Americans to begin to think of the United States as a fundamentally multiracial society,” historian Peggy Pascoe says. “And that strikes me as a really important move, partly because it will help dismantle the long history of white supremacy in the United States but also because it will help the United States fit more comfortably in the global world and the 21st century.”…

…For many activists and scholars, racial statistics still present a quandary of sorts. Naomi Zack, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon, who is multiracial herself and has written extensively on multiracial issues, acknowledges the 2000 and 2010 Census changes as a key advance. But she also argues for a stand-alone multiracial category and the eventual abolition of “race” itself. She argues that race is not a biological category but a concept, something that the Census acknowledges in its own briefs.

Read the entire article here.

Biracial Identity: Beyond Black and White

The Boston College Chronicle
2003-02-13
Volume 11, Number 11

Sean Smith, Chronicle Editor

Sociologist’s expertise built on experience, not just scholarly inquiry

The man in the next seat had been eyeing her furtively for a while, so Asst. Prof. Kerry Ann Rockquemore (Sociology) figured it was only a matter of time before the question came.

What are you?”

There was neither malice nor menace in her fellow airplane passenger’s voice, but Rockquemore – recalling the event in a recent interview – knew what he was asking: He wanted to know her racial and ethnic background.

The daughter of a black father and white mother, Rockquemore was no stranger to questions and misperceptions about her appearance. That very day, one person had spoken Spanish to her, apparently thinking she was Latina, and a casual remark by the attendant at her flight check-in indicated that he took her for Italian.

“What are you?”…

Read the entire article here.