Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Number of multiracial people grows in Oneida County

    Number of multiracial people grows in Oneida County

    The Observer-Dispatch
    Utica, New York
    2011-07-14

    Elizabeth Cooper

    UTICA — Nisa Duong is part Vietnamese, part black, part American Indian and part white.
     
    But the 19-year-old Utica resident said her racial and ethnic identity isn’t at the forefront of her mind, and if it comes up, it’s in positive ways.
     
    “I feel really unique because of all those cultures being bundled up together,” she said. “It sets you apart from other people. It makes you who you are.”
     
    Duong is one of a growing number of multiracial people living in Oneida County.
     
    New census figures show the number of people identifying themselves as mixed race has risen about 35 percent since the 2000 Census, from 3,583 to 4,865.
     
    Combinations of white, black and Asian are turning up in greater numbers, and each statistic illuminates a different aspect of the region’s ever-changing mosaic.

    • The number of Oneida County residents who said they are a combination of black and white jumped from 831 to 2,157.
    • The number of those saying they are white and Asian rose from 388 to 586.
    • The number saying they are part black and part Asian went from 18 to 51.

    Those numbers still make up a small portion of the total population of the county, which stands at 234,878. Still, they echo a transformation going on across the nation.
     
    Experts attributed the change to several factors, Hamilton College Associate Professor of Sociology Jenny Irons said…

    …The Obama factor

    Even as attitudes toward race change, there are ways people’s attitudes have remained the same.

    Irons noted that even though President Barack Obama has been clear about his biracial background, he still is talked about as the nation’s first black president.

    “In our society we still think of race in pretty rigid, fixed categories,” she said…

    …Black and white

    Michael Fenimore, 31, is half black and half white, but when it came to filling out the census form, he said he was black.

    “One thing my mom always told me is the color of my skin is black,” he said. “I always put myself down as a black male and am proud of that. I know who my parents are and I’m proud of who I am.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Robeson County Native Writes Book on Lumbee Indians

    Robeson County Native Writes Book on Lumbee Indians

    The Pilot
    Southern Pines, North Carolina
    2010-06-16

    Kay Grismer

    “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

    The Native Americans who have lived along the Lumber River in Robeson County for generations may have been given names to identify their “tribe”— “Croatan,” “Cherokee,” “Siouan” and “Lumbee” — but their collective identity as a “People” does not come from the “outside.”

    “The word ‘People’ acknowledges that Indians have a history and a sense of self that goes back to before the colonial relationships that labeled us as Indian, Native American or Indigenous,” says Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, assistant professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and a Lumbee Indian. “Growing up, I knew first and foremost that I was part of a People, that I had a family and that my family connected to other families; and that all of these families lived in a place, what for us was a sacred homeland: the land along the Lumber River in Robeson County. Kinship and place are the foundational layer of Indian identity in Robeson County.”

    This identity as a People has been tested repeatedly over time.

    “Indian people are burdened with defending their identity more often and more extensively than any other ethnic group in America,” says historian Alexandra Harmon.

    This is especially true for the 50,000 Lumbees, the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River, who have had to struggle for recognition and acceptance.

    During the years between 1885 and 1956, Robeson County Indians adopted different names, “not because they didn’t know who they were or what constituted their identity,” Lowery says, “but because federal and state officials kept changing their criteria for authenticity.”

    Lowery will discuss the evolution of the Lumbee Indians Thursday, June 17, at 4 p.m. at The Country Bookshop in downtown Southern Pines, when she presents her book, “Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity and the Making of a Nation.”…

    …In a segregated society where white supremacists had the power to reclassify Indians as “colored,” Indians began to distance themselves from both blacks and whites. White supremacy demanded that Indians avoid blacks both politically and socially and deny inclusion to community members who might possess African ancestry.

    “Excluding blacks from their community may have preserved some autonomy, but it sometimes required Indian leaders to forswear their own kin ties and the value they placed on family,” Lowery adds. “This process of adopting segregation to affirm their distinctiveness results in an additional layer of identity for Indians who had previously thought of themselves as a People. They began to express their intentions as a race and as a tribe.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Jackson Whites

    The Jackson Whites

    The New Yorker
    1938-09-17
    page 29

    George Weller

    REPORTER AT LARGE about the Jackson Whites; history and origin of a primitive race living in the Ramapo Mountains. They are a mixture of three races, the white, the Negro, & the American Indians. Next to being an Indian, the greatest point of distinction for the Jackson White is to be an albino. The Ramapos have several entire families of albinos. The queen of the albinos was Nellie Mann, who in the late 1890’s travelled with the Barnum & Bailey sideshow, billed as a wild girl captured in the Australian bush. Mentions the van Dunks an albino family; the de Frees family which has branches all over the Ramapos, and Uncle Willie de Frees, a patriarch of the Jackson Whites and the only surving doctor

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Ramapough Mountain People: “The Jackson Whites”: A Pathfinder and Annotated Bibliography

    Ramapough Mountain People: “The Jackson Whites”: A Pathfinder and Annotated Bibliography

    1995

    Randy D. Ralph

    Introduction:

    My parents moved the family way, way out in the country, after my baby brother was born, to a little tract house in the middle of the Preakness Valley in Passaic County, New Jersey. The valley was open and green and filled with Dutch dairy farms and Italian truck gardens. It lay snuggled between the Ramapo and Watchung ridges. Our family was one of the first to move into the new neighborhood between Old Man van der Veen’s dairy cows and Mrs. Capodimaggi’s vegetable garden. One day in mid-summer, not long after we’d moved in, a new kid showed up at the baseball diamond the us kids had carved out of one of the still-vacant lots. His name was Willie G. Mann, Jr., or, just “Junior.” He became one of my best friends for reasons I didn’t understand until many years later.

    I was a fat kid. I was usually the last to be picked when the kids chose up sides for baseball. I could hit OK, but I couldn’t catch worth a damn and I couldn’t run fast either. More often than not, I’d wind up in the middle of a fight over whose team I’d made lose the last time—until Junior showed up.

    The kids on the block thought Junior was “weird-looking” and said so. His complexion was almost bronze. He had sparkling Blue Plate Special blue eyes and jet black, curly hair. He looked for all the world like an Indian to me. To the kids on the block it was clear he wasn’t “one of us.” He was lanky and athletic, though. It almost seemed he could hit a home run with one hand tied behind his back, catch a pop fly blind-folded or round the bases in a blur and slide into home without a drop of sweat on his brow. He was a natural, and that was all that mattered to them…

    “The Jackson Whites”:

    The Ramapough Mountain People, also known locally, and in the pejorative as “The Jackson Whites,” are an extended clan of closely interrelated families living in the Ramapo Mountains and their more remote valleys principally in Bergen County, New Jersey, but also in immediately adjacent Passaic County, New Jersey, and Rockland County, New York. Their largely Dutch surnames, de Groot, de Fries, van der Donck, and Mann, in all their variant spellings, are among the oldest in the countryside and predate the Revolutionary War. They live only thirty miles or so from downtown Manhattan which lies just across the Hudson River (see map). They are shy, gentle, proud, and reclusive people who, until relatively recently, seldom ventured far from their mountain homes.

    They are clearly racially mixed. There are elements from native Indian, Negro, Dutch, and possibly German (Hessian) and Italian blood lines…

    Readd the entire article here.

  • Methodology and Measurement in the Study of Multiracial Americans: Identity, Classification, and Perceptions

    Methodology and Measurement in the Study of Multiracial Americans: Identity, Classification, and Perceptions

    Sociology Compass
    Volume 5, Issue 7 (July 2011)
    pages 607–617
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00388.x

    Melissa R. Herman, Assistant Professor of Sociology
    Dartmouth College

    This article lays out some of the methodological issues in doing research on multiracial people (those whose immediate and/or distant ancestors come from different racial or ethnic groups), including how they are counted, how they are perceived, how they identify themselves, what factors affect their self-identifications, and how their identifications change over time.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Race and Sociological Reason in the Republic: Inquiries on the Métis in the French Empire (1908-37)

    Race and Sociological Reason in the Republic: Inquiries on the Métis in the French Empire (1908-37)

    International Sociology
    Volume 17, Number 3 (September 2002)
    361-391
    DOI: 10.1177/0268580902017003002

    Emmanuelle Saada, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies
    Columbia University

    This article compares two collective surveys on the métis conducted in 1908 and 1937 in the French colonies. Métis was a category used mostly to describe children born out of wedlock to indigenous mothers and European fathers. The first inquiry was sponsored by anthropologists of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris; the second was an administrative survey that brought together social scientists, administrators and a variety of other experts. The comparison sheds light on the specific trajectory of the ‘métis problem’ in the French Empire, and on the process of construction of a social category. More broadly, it invites a reappraisal of the signification and role of race in both the construction of French citizenship and the history of French social thought in the first half of the 20th century.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Do You See What I Am? How Observers’ Backgrounds Affect Their Perceptions of Multiracial Faces

    Do You See What I Am? How Observers’ Backgrounds Affect Their Perceptions of Multiracial Faces

    Social Psychology Quarterly
    Volume 73, Number 1 (March 2010)
    pages 58-78
    DOI: 10.1177/0190272510361436

    Melissa R. Herman, Assistant Professor of Sociology
    Dartmouth College

    Although race is one of the most salient status characteristics in American society, many observers cannot distinguish the racial ancestries of multiracial youth. This paper examines how people perceive multiracial adolescents: specifically, I investigate whether observers perceive the adolescents as multiracial and whether these racial perceptions are congruent with the multiracial adolescents’ self-identifications. Results show that 1) observers perceived close to half of multiracial targets as monoracial, 2) multiracial targets who identified themselves as black were nearly always perceived as black but not always as multiracial, and 3) the demographic and environmental characteristics of observers had no bearing on the congruence of their racial perceptions. That is, regardless of their own demographic characteristics or exposure to people of other races, observers were more congruent when examining targets who self-identified as black or white and less congruent when identifying targets from Asian, Hispanic, American Indian, or Middle Eastern backgrounds. Despite the demographic trend toward multiracialism in the United States, observers’ perceptions may maintain the status quo in race relations: a black-white dichotomy where part-blacks remain in the collective black category.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Oreo, Topdeck and Eminem: Hybrid identities and global media flows

    Oreo, Topdeck and Eminem: Hybrid identities and global media flows

    International Journal of Cultural Studies
    Volume 14, Nubmer 2 (March 2011)
    pages 153-172
    DOI: 10.1177/1367877910387971

    Jane Stadler, Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies
    University of Queensland, Australia

    The slang terms Oreo (someone who looks black but acts white) and Topdeck (someone who looks white but acts black) draw on the language of popular culture to signify racial hybridity, superseding slurs such as ‘black honkie’ and ‘wigger’. Using the terms Oreo and Topdeck to frame the analysis, this article investigates how identity politics finds expression in language, youth media and popular culture. It questions how global media flows affect conceptions of black masculinity by contrasting cinematic representations of African-Americans and black Africans in Shaft and the South African film Hijack Stories, and by examining class, ethnicity and rap culture in 8 Mile. I argue that, as South African media culture reflexively reworks messages about black identities, it produces terminology and texts that neither simply reinforce nor resist racial stereotypes, but legitimate the diversification of blackness by making cultural transition and difference visible.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • How medicine is advancing beyond race

    How medicine is advancing beyond race

    CNN.com
    2011-07-08

    Elizabeth Landau, CNN.com Health Writer/Producer

    (CNN)—No matter what race you consider yourself to be, you have a unique genetic makeup.

    That’s why, as technology improves and researchers explore new implications of the human genome, medicine is going to become more individually tailored in a model called personalized medicine.

    Although we’ve been hearing for years that people of particular races are at higher risk for certain illnesses, personalized medicine will (in theory) make better predictions based on actual genetic makeup. And even now, race is less relevant to your own health care than you might think.
     
    But doctors say a patient’s culture—the collection of norms, goals, attitudes, values and beliefs—will always be important to health care, no matter how sophisticated genetic technology gets.

    Biologically, what is race?

    When it comes down to it there’s, no clear-cut way of saying that one person “belongs” to one race or another—in fact, a person who has the skin color and hair type typical of one race may self-identify in a completely different way.

    And if you think that race comes from location-based populations, many Americans don’t have a “pure” genetic heritage from only one world region. In fact, 9 million Americans identified as multiracial on the most recent census, so it’s hard to make these distinctions.

    You probably have genes that came from several groups of ancestral communities. Based on archaeological evidence, everyone’s earliest ancestors came from Africa more than 2 million years ago, so we’re all descended from the same “race” anyway.

    “There are genetic ancestries—markers that you can see—but those don’t necessarily perfectly correlate with what people consider their own race to be, because that’s sort of an artificial construct,” said Dr. Wendy Chung, assistant professor of pediatrics at Columbia University Medical Center…

    …Sometimes race obscures underlying mechanisms for genetic traits.
     
    For decades, doctors thought that sickle cell disease was exclusively African, but some people of Mediterranean and Indian origin also have the genetic trait. We now know that the genetic trait for sickle cell disease protects against malaria, and that it is found among people with ancestry in places where malaria is, or used to be found, biologists Marcus Feldman and Richard Lewontin point out in their essay “Race, Ancestry, and Medicine.”

    Race can also hide underlying social issues—namely, poverty.
     
    African-American life expectancy at birth is on average, about five fewer years than white Americans, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But Dr. Vicente Navarro at Johns Hopkins University has shown in his research that social class is a bigger driver of U.S. life expectancy than race or gender. He points out in a 1990 Lancet study that the United States is the only Western developed nation that does not report health statistics according to class…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Misrepresentation of Loving v. Virginia

    The clever positioning by multiracial identity activists of the Loving marriage as the 1960s vanguards of multiraciality, promotes several troubling ideologies that should exposed and examined. These ideologies effectively distance the Lovings’ saga from the greater African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Firstly, the emphasis on the marriage of the Richard and Mildred Loving implies that these unjust anti-miscegenation laws had no adverse impact towards Black-Americans and other people of color as a whole. Finally, and most importantly, the continual dissemination of the myth of increased multiracial births since the Loving decision, is an insidious maneuver that illogically seeks to erase the history of over three centuries of interracial marriages and the millions of descendants from those unions. As I have stated before, we are not becoming a multiracial society, we already are a multiracial society and we have been so for centuries.

    Steven F. Riley, “Don’t Pass on Context: The Importance of Academic Discourses in Contemporary Discussions on the Multiracial Experience,” (paper presented at the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, Los Angeles, California, June 11, 2011).