Mixed Race Studies

Why We Need to Talk About Race in Adoption

Bitch Magazine
2013-05-29

Nicole Callahan

Two years ago, on vacation in the Great Smoky Mountains, I saw a white couple at a restaurant with their Asian daughter. Though her father told her to quit staring, I felt the girl’s eyes on me all through the meal. I smiled at her, feeling a strong sense of kinship, a pang of sympathy.  As a child, whenever I saw another Asian person—which I hardly ever did—I used to stare, too, hungry for the sight of someone, anyone, who looked like me.

Adoption has changed in the 32 years since a social worker told my parents “not to worry” about my ethnicity. Thanks to many transracial adoptees who have shared their experiences, there is a greater emphasis on the importance of racial and cultural identity. Numerous books have been written on the subject, and excellent blog posts abound. Transnational adoption has inspired documentary films such as First Person Plural, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, Wo Ai Ni Mommy, and Somewhere Between.  

While “colorblindness” in adoption has been widely challenged, however, not everyone is convinced—like the adoptive mother who recently told me, “I don’t see my son’s color. Race is just not an issue for us.”

Some people maintain that any cultural loss is unimportant compared to what children gain through adoption. But in both mainstream media and personal conversations about adoption, cultural and racial identity need not be pitted against a child’s right to love, safety, and security…

…We cannot have an honest discussion about transracial adoption if we aren’t willing to discuss race, prejudice, and privilege. Adoptees need to feel safe when we talk about the instances of racism we encounter. This may not sound easy—because it isn’t easy for white parents to raise children of color. But as the mother of two multiracial children, I can say that it’s not easy for parents of color, either…

Read the entire article here.

Black woman rises to leadership in Daughters of the American Revolution

theGrio
2013-05-26

Donovan X. Ramsey

This month, Autier Allen-Craft was elected to the position of regent in the Norwalk–Village Green chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) in Connecticut. Allen-Craft, a black woman, says the organization has come a long way since its years of controversy related to racial exclusion.

Allen-Craft rose up the ranks in the organization, serving as vice regent of her Connecticut chapter two years ago before being elected to her current, high-level position. Just a few decades prior, she began the search into her family tree that would eventually lead her to membership in DAR.

“I attended Benedict College in South Carolina and I while I was there I lived with my maternal grandmother,” Allen-Craft told theGrio. “I was always interested in why my older ancestors looked they way they did. They were very fair. So I began to ask her questions about who her parents were, and who her grandparents were, and she would tell me as far back as she could remember.”

Before long, Allen-Craft’s curiosity led her to the South Carolina archives in Columbia.

An amazing ancestral discovery

After years of research, in about 1990, she stumbled upon records of her great-great grandfather — a white plantation owner, who was her third-great grandfather. She says after getting over the initial shock, she looked deeper into his ancestry and found that his grandfather, her fifth-great grandfather, had fought in the American Revolution. “He was one of the few plantation owners that would claim his offspring with a black woman,” she said of her great-great grandfather. “Because of that, I’ve been able to trace back as far as I have.”

According to historical record, blacks played a significant role the American Revolution. One of the first “martyrs” of the American Revolution was Crispus Attucks, a man of African Descent who was killed in the Boston Massacre. Black Minutemen fought at the battles of Lexington and Concord as early as April 1775. And when Rhode Island needed soldiers, the state legislature passed a law in 1778 that said “every able-bodied Negro, mulatto, or Indian man-slave” could fight. An estimated 200 men enlisted with the promise of freedom as a reward…

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The United States of Mestizo

John F. Blair, Publisher
2013-01-01
48 pages
4¼ x 5½
978-1-58838-288-7
ebook ISBN: 978-1-60306-200-8

Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture
Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts

This powerful manifesto attests to the fundamental changes the nation has undergone in the last half-century. Ilan Stavans meditates on the way the cross-fertilizing process that defined the Americas during the colonial period—the racial melding of Europeans and indigenous people—was a foretelling of the current miscegenation that is the most salient profile of America today. If, as W. E. B. DuBois once argued, the 20th century was defined by a color fracture, Stavans believes that the 21st will be shaped by the multicolor line that will make us all a sum of parts.

Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race

University of Illinois Press
2014
288 pages
6.125 x 9.25 in.
5 black & white photographs
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-03811-2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07959-7

Wanda A. Hendricks, Associate Professor of History
University of South Carolina

The biography of a key activist of the Progressive Era

Born shortly before the Civil War, activist and reformer Fannie Barrier Williams (1855-1944) became one of the most prominent educated African American women of her generation. In this first biography of Williams, Wanda A. Hendricks focuses on the critical role of geography and social position in Williams’s life, illustrating how the reform activism of Williams and other black women was bound up with place and space.

Growing up in Brockport, New York, a mostly white society that encouraged social equality and embraced her and her family, Williams was insulated from the political turmoil surrounding the debates about slavery and black rights. Hendricks shows how Williams became “raced” for the first time in early adulthood, when she became a teacher in Missouri and Washington, D.C., and faced the injustices of racism and the stark contrast between the lives of freed slaves and her own privileged upbringing. She carried this new awareness with her to Chicago, where she joined forces with women’s clubs, the Unitarian church, and various other interracial social justice organizations to become a prominent spokesperson for Progressive economic, racial, and gender reforms.

By highlighting how Williams experienced a set of freedoms in the North that were not imaginable in the South, this clearly-written, widely accessible biography expands how we understand intellectual possibilities, economic success, and social mobility in post-Reconstruction America.

Kings for Three Days: The Play of Race and Gender in an Afro-Ecuadorian Festival

University of Illinois Press
May 2013
216 pages
6 x 9 in.
16 black & white photographs, 3 maps
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-03751-1
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07901-6

Jean Muteba Rahier, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African & African Diaspora Studies
Florida International University

A vibrant study of symbol and social significance in one of Ecuador’s black populations

With its rich mix of cultures, European influences, colonial tensions, and migration from bordering nations, Ecuador has long drawn the interest of ethnographers, historians, and political scientists. In this book, Jean Muteba Rahier delivers a highly detailed, thought-provoking examination of the racial, sexual, and social complexities of Afro-Ecuadorian culture, as revealed through the annual Festival of the Kings. During the Festival, the people of various villages and towns of Esmeraldas—Ecuador’s province most associated with blackness—engage in celebratory and parodic portrayals, often donning masks, cross-dressing, and disguising themselves as blacks, indigenous people, and whites, in an obvious critique of local, provincial, and national white, white-mestizo, and light-mulatto elites. Rahier shows that this festival, as performed in different locations, reveals each time a specific location’s perspective on the larger struggles over identity, class, and gender relations in the racial-spatial order of Esmeraldas and of the Ecuadorian nation in general.

Contents

• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Setting Up the Stage: Contextualizing the Afro-Esmeraldian Festival of the Kings
• 2. The Village of Santo Domingo de Ónzole and the Period of Preparation of the Festival of the Kings: The Centrality of Sexual Dichotomy and Role Reversal
• 3. The Festival of the Kings in Santo Domingo de Ónzole
• 4. The Festival of the Kings in La Tola
• 5. Race, Sexuality, and Gender as They Relate to the Festival of the Kings
• 6. Performances and Contexts of the Play in January 2003
• Conclusion: From the Centrality of Place in Esmeraldian Ethnography to Theoretical and Methodological Considerations for the Study of Festivities
• Glossary of Esmeraldian Spanish Terms
• Notes
• References
• Index

Seeing Race in Modern America

University of North Carolina Press
November 2013
Approx. 264 pages
6.125 x 9.25
10 color plates., 97 halftones, notes, index
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4696-1068-9

Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies
Brown University

In this fiercely urgent book, Matthew Pratt Guterl focuses on how and why we come to see race in very particular ways. What does it mean to see someone as a color? As racially mixed or ethnically ambiguous? What history makes such things possible? Drawing creatively from advertisements, YouTube videos, and everything in between, Guterl redirects our understanding of racial sight away from the dominant categories of color–away from brown and yellow and black and white–and instead insists that we confront the visual practices that make those same categories seem so irrefutably important.

Zooming out for the bigger picture, Guterl illuminates the long history of the practice of seeing—and believing in—race, and reveals that our troublesome faith in the details discerned by the discriminating glance is widespread and very popular. In so doing, he upends the possibility of a postracial society by revealing how deeply race is embedded in our culture, with implications that are often matters of life and death.

A “Mulatto Escape Hatch” in the United States? Examining Evidence of Racial and Social Mobility During the Jim Crow Era

Demography
Published Online: 2013-04-20
DOI: 10.1007/s13524-013-0210-8

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Aaron Gullickson, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Oregon

Racial distinctions in the United States have long been characterized as uniquely rigid and governed by strict rules of descent, particularly along the black-white boundary. This is often contrasted with countries, such as Brazil, that recognize “mixed” or intermediate racial categories and allow for more fluidity or ambiguity in racial classification. Recently released longitudinal data from the IPUMS Linked Representative Samples, and the brief inclusion of a “mulatto” category in the U.S. Census, allow us to subject this generally accepted wisdom to empirical test for the 1870–1920 period. We find substantial fluidity in black-mulatto classification between censuses—including notable “downward” racial mobility. Using person fixed-effects models, we also find evidence that among Southern men, the likelihood of being classified as mulatto was related to intercensal changes in occupational status. These findings have implications for studies of race and inequality in the United States, cross-national research on racial classification schemes in the Americas, and for how demographers collect and interpret racial data.

Introduction

More than 40 years ago. historian Carl Degler outlined a provocative comparison of race relations in Brazil and the United States. The crux of his argument about then-contemporary differences between the two countries rested on the relative status of “mulattos.” Specifically, Degler claimed that the progeny of unions between black and white Brazilians were accorded an intermediate position in the social and racial hierarchy: “The mulatto in Brazil represents an escape hatch for the Negro, so to speak, which is unavailable in the United States” (Degler 1971:107). More controversial, still, is the related and oft-repeated assertion that Afro-Brazilians can avail themselves of this “escape hatch” not only across generations by marrying lighter-skinned spouses but thanks to “the ability of wealth and education to whiten” within a single generation. As Degler put it: “Once ‘whitened’ by money, a ‘Negro’ becomes a ‘mulato’ or ‘pardo’ regardless of his actual color” (Degler 1971:107-08; emphasis in the original).

The ensuing scholarly debate has focused on whether Degler’s notion of an escape hatch was an accurate description of the Brazilian racial hierarchy, with its absence in the United States largely taken for granted. Researchers have come to varying conclusions regarding whether the situation of lighter-skinned or mixed-race Afro-Brazilians represents a meaningful improvement, materially or otherwise, compared with that of their darker-skinned counterparts (Loveman et al. 2012; Sheriff 2001; Idles 2004). Consensus regarding the claim that “money whitens” has also been elusive because of the lack of nationally representative, longitudinal data on race and socioeconomic status (SES) in Brazil (although, sec Schwartzman 2007). In the United States, some “passing“—that is, when people with African ancestry hide their full family history to take advantage of their “white” appearance—was and is publicly acknowledged (e.g.. Gates 1997; Johnson 1925), but it has generally been considered the exception rather than the rule of racial classification and social mobility. Yet, nationally representative, longitudinal data on the racial classification and SES of individuals do exist in the United States that could provide direct, systematic evidence on these issues. Research using the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) shows that social status and racial fluidity are linked in contemporary America: increases in status increase the odds of being classified as white and decrease the odds of being classified as black, and decreases in status decrease the odds of being classified as white and increase the odds of being classified as black (Saperstein and Penner 2012). Thus, regardless of whether the “mulatto escape hatch” is—or ever was—an accurate description of racial stratification in Brazil, it has become pertinent to ask whether increases in social position ever led to increases in racial position among Americans of African ancestry.

Recently released historical linked census samples from the Minnesota Population Center allow us to answer this question. These data provide fresh insight into the era of racial retrenchment following the Civil War and Reconstruction, and bracketing the turn of the twentieth century—a period when “Jim Crow” laws and the “one-drop rule” dictating racial classification were slowly building up steam in the South, even as the U.S. Census was going to great lengths to count the mixed ancestries of Americans. In this context, we find substantial fluidity in mulatto classification between censuses. We also find evidence for a recursive relationship between racial…

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Looking the Part: Social Status Cues Shape Race Perception

PLoS ONE
Volume 6, Issue 9: e25107
Published: 2011-09-26
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0025107

Jonathan B. Freemam,  Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Andrew M. Penner, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Matthias Scheutz, Associate Professor of Computer Science
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Nalini Ambady, Professor of Psychology
Stanford University

It is commonly believed that race is perceived through another’s facial features, such as skin color. In the present research, we demonstrate that cues to social status that often surround a face systematically change the perception of its race. Participants categorized the race of faces that varied along White–Black morph continua and that were presented with high-status or low-status attire. Low-status attire increased the likelihood of categorization as Black, whereas high-status attire increased the likelihood of categorization as White; and this influence grew stronger as race became more ambiguous (Experiment 1). When faces with high-status attire were categorized as Black or faces with low-status attire were categorized as White, participants’ hand movements nevertheless revealed a simultaneous attraction to select the other race-category response (stereotypically tied to the status cue) before arriving at a final categorization. Further, this attraction effect grew as race became more ambiguous (Experiment 2). Computational simulations then demonstrated that these effects may be accounted for by a neurally plausible person categorization system, in which contextual cues come to trigger stereotypes that in turn influence race perception. Together, the findings show how stereotypes interact with physical cues to shape person categorization, and suggest that social and contextual factors guide the perception of race.

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Remembering Crispus Attucks and the forgotten black soldiers of the American Revolution

The Grio
2013-05-27

Ronda Racha Penrice

Crispus Attucks. (Library of Congress)

Memorial Day may be more about barbecues and blowout sales than honoring our deceased veterans these days, but there are many reasons for African-Americans in particular to take pause.

Starting with the Civil War, on through World Wars I and II, moving into the Vietnam War, the Korean War and, most recently, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, African-Americans have had a strong and active military presence dating back to this country’s founding.

In fact, many credit the onset of the American Revolutionary War to the Boston Massacre that occurred on March 5, 1770 when Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave of African and Native American heritage, fell to his death while standing up to the British. Some may even consider him to be the first American, of any color, to fall in defense of what would come to be seen as our American ideals.

Centuries later, much is still unknown about Crispus Attucks, who has widely been credited as the first to die that fateful day in March. Born in either Framingham or Natick in Massachusetts, Attucks worked on a whaling crew that sailed out of Boston Harbor. Thanks to what the Massachusetts colonists believed were unfair taxation policies from the British Parliament, starting with the Stamp Act of 1765 and continuing with the passage of the Townshend Acts in 1767 (which mainly placed import taxes on goods from England), tensions were high in the colony; so much so that the British began to increase their military presence in 1768…

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The Forgotten Amerasians

The New York Times
2013-05-27

Christopher M. Lapinig
Yale University

NEW HAVEN — THE Senate Judiciary Committee approved an immigration reform bill last week that would gradually make citizenship possible for as many as 11 million undocumented immigrants. The bill is widely described as sweeping in scope. In fact, it is not quite sweeping enough, as it leaves the plight of another group of would-be Americans unaddressed.

Take Pinky. In 1974, her father, Jimmy Edwards, was a 22-year-old sailor aboard a United States Navy ship visiting the Philippines, 9,000 miles away from his hometown, Kinston, N.C. He fell in love with a Filipina named Merlie Daet, who gave birth to their daughter, Pinky. Mr. Edwards had hoped to marry Merlie, but as a sailor, he could not marry a foreigner without his captain’s consent. The captain refused. Despite his best efforts over the years, Mr. Edwards was unable to find Pinky (or Merlie).

Until 2005, that is. USA Bound, a now defunct nonprofit organization that reconnected Filipino children with their American fathers, told Mr. Edwards that it had found Pinky. He flew to the Philippines, only to find her living in poverty in a cinder-block hut in the mountains with her husband and five children. Determined to give her a better life, he sought United States citizenship for her.

To his surprise, it was too late. Although by birthright, children born out of wedlock to an American father and a foreign mother are entitled to United States citizenship, they must file paternity certifications no later than their 18th birthday to get it. But since the military bases in the Philippines have been closed for over 20 years, virtually all Filipino “Amerasians” — a term coined by the author and activist Pearl S. Buck to describe children of American servicemen and Asian mothers — have passed that age…

…In a Catholic society that stigmatizes illegitimate children, Filipinos deploy an arsenal of slurs against Amerasians: iniwan ng barko (“left by the ship”) and babay sa daddy (“goodbye to Daddy”) among them. Black Amerasians are often called “charcoal,” or worse…

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