Mixed Race Studies

UT students, staff reflect on experiences with racial passing

The Daily Texan: Serving the University of Texas at Austin Community Since 1900
2021-12-05

Sofia Treviño, Life & Arts Senior Reporter

Julius Shieh/The Daily Texan

Disliking her paler skin compared to other darker-complected Hispanics growing up, Rachel González-Martin spent hours lying under the sun willing herself to tan. Only burning and turning red, she grew frustrated. González-Martin wanted others to easily recognize her as Hispanic.

“There’s who we know we are and how we tell our own story, but we can never escape from what people see in us or read from our appearance,” the associate professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies said.

Racial passing — a term used to describe those perceived as a member of another racial group than their own — can affect how closely people connect to and feel a part of their communities. For UT students and staff, the process of navigating different cultural stereotypes and learning to embrace their identities regardless of their appearance remains a lifelong project.

Growing up in Oakland, California, with very few fellow Hispanics, González-Martin felt she needed to physically show her identity. However, as she’s grown older, she said she’s learned to accept her own meaning of belonging to a community aside from outside biases…

Read the entire article here.

Majority of Latinos Say Skin Color Impacts Opportunity in America and Shapes Daily Life

Pew Research Center
Washington, D.C.
2021-11-04
63 pages

Latinos with darker skin color report more discrimination experiences than Latinos with lighter skin color

The perceived impact of skin color in the lives of U.S. Latinos is broad. From impacting their ability to get ahead in the country to shaping their daily life experiences to dealing with discrimination, skin color is seen by Latinos as an important factor affecting their lives and life chances.

A majority (62%) of Hispanic adults say having a darker skin color hurts Hispanics’ ability to get ahead in the United States today at least a little. A similar share (59%) say having a lighter skin color helps Hispanics get ahead. And 57% say skin color shapes their daily life experiences a lot or some, with about half saying discrimination based on race or skin color is a “very big problem” in the U.S. today, according to Pew Research Center’s National Survey of Latinos, a bilingual, national survey of 3,375 Hispanic U.S. adults conducted in March 2021.

Colorism is a form of discrimination based on skin color, usually, though not always, favoring lighter skin color over darker skin color within a racial or ethnic group. While it can be tied to racism, it is not necessarily the same. (Racism is prejudice directed at members of a racial or ethnic group because of their origin.) For example, Hispanics in the U.S. may face discrimination because they are Hispanic (a form of racism), but the degree of discrimination may vary based on skin color, with those of darker shades experiencing more incidents (a form of colorism). And because of colorism’s deep roots in the histories of Latin America and the United States, discrimination based on skin color can occur among Hispanics just as much as it can be directed at Hispanics by non-Hispanics.

To measure this dimension of Latino identity in the United States, the survey asked respondents to identify the skin color that best resembled their own using a version of the Yadon-Ostfeld skin-color scale. Respondents were shown ten skin colors that ranged from fair to dark (see text box below for the images and scale used). Fully 80% of Latino adults selected a color between one and four, or lighter skin colors, while 15% selected a color between five and ten on the scale, or darker skin colors.¹…

Table of Contents

• Majority of Latinos Say Skin Color Impacts Opportunity in America and Shapes Daily Life
  • Discrimination and skin color
  • Impact of race, skin color is a topic of conversation with relatives and friends for Hispanics
  • Half of Latinos say there is too little national attention on racial issues concerning Latino people
  • Hispanics often hear other Hispanics make racially insensitive comments and jokes about Hispanics and non-Hispanics alike
  • While Hispanics say skin color affects their ability to get ahead in America, other factors are seen as important as well
  • For Latinos, discrimination experiences and views about skin color and race are linked
• 1. Half of U.S Latinos experienced some form of discrimination during the first year of the pandemic
• 2. For many Latinos, skin color shapes their daily life and affects opportunity in America
• 3. Latinos divided on whether race gets too much or too little attention in the U.S. today
• 4. Measuring the racial identity of Latinos
• Acknowledgments
• Methodology
• Appendix: Additional tables

Read the entire report in PDF or HTML format.

The Truth About White America

The Atlantic
2021-10-25

Morris Levy, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations
University of Southern California

Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology
Graduate Center, City University of New York

Dowell Myers, Professor of Policy, Planning, and Demography
University of Southern California

The Atlantic

The Census Bureau wanted to gather data about a changing nation, but ended up reinforcing old racial categories.

If you paid attention to the news this summer about the release of 2020 census data, you probably heard that America’s white population is in free fall. Big, if true.

The statistic that launched a thousand hot takes and breathless voice-overs about racial change was a supposed 8.6 percent, or 19 million, drop in the number of white Americans since 2010. Headlines cast this decline as unprecedented in census history and signaled that the nation’s majority-minority future loomed even closer than previously forecast. Pundits spun it as a harbinger of policy change and partisan realignment, for better or worse. Some wisely cautioned against demography-as-destiny assumptions in a country where the definition and public understanding of race can change rapidly. But few observers questioned whether the reported differences between the 2010 and 2020 censuses reflected real demographic change or simply statistical noise.

Commentators should have read the fine print before rushing to trot out their favorite narratives. If they had, they would have discovered that the eye-popping figure at the center of this summer’s hoopla is an illusion. The apparent decline in the white population is a result of changes to the Census Bureau’s protocol for measuring and classifying racial identity. The changes aimed to more accurately gauge the expansion of the country’s mixed-race population through new and more sophisticated data collection and classification techniques that capture the nuances of Americans’ multifaceted racial and ethnic identities. But a combination of bureaucratic constraints and messaging failures paved the way to public confusion…

Read the entire article here.

MASC presents The U.S. Census Data [Online Event]

Multiracial Americans of Southern California
2021-10-06 18:00-19:30 EDT, (22:00-23:30Z)

Let’s talk 2020 U.S. Census results and how they illuminate the U.S. population as more multiracial (from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8 million in 2020)

The U.S. population is much more multiracial and more diverse than recorded in the 2010 U.S. Census. Research and data from “2020 Census Illuminates Racial and Ethnic Composition of the Country” by Nicholas Jones, Rachel Marks, Roberto Ramirez, Merarys Ríos-Vargas showed the improvements and changes on the U.S. Census questionnaire enabled a more thorough and accurate depiction of how people self-identify, yielding a more accurate portrait of how people report their Hispanic origin and race within the context of a two-question format.

On October 6, 2021 at 3pm PDT (6pm EDT), join MASC as we present a virtual event that will bring experts from the U.S. Census, Nielsen and MASC to discuss these changes and what the results revealed.

Expert Panelists:

• Nicholas A. Jones, Director & Senior Advisor of Race and Ethnic Research & Outreach in the Census Bureau’s Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau
• Rachel Marks, Chief of the Racial Statistics Branch, U.S. Census Bureau
• Stacie M. de Armas, Senior Vice President Inclusive Insights & Initiatives, Nielsen
• Thomas Lopez, Treasurer, MASC
• Moderator: Sonia Smith Kang, President, MASC

Watch the discussion (01:28:30) here.

‘People Assume I’m White. This is The Racism I See’

Newsweek
2021-10-14

Nikki Barthelmess

A few months ago, I answered a knock at my door. My neighbor, James^*, launched into a complaint. “That silver Honda is parked in front, and we have a friend coming over who wants to park there,” he said. He was referencing the car belonging to Ana^*, a family friend who I hired days before to help with childcare for my toddler.

Ana appeared behind me to see what was going on. James looked at Ana and then at me, and despite Ana being only a few feet away, he nodded at Ana and spoke as if she wasn’t there. “Cleaning crew?” he asked me. My head snapped back in shock.

My eyes darted to Ana to see if she’d heard, and somehow it seemed she hadn’t. I stammered, unsure of what to say. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She wasn’t holding a mop or dusting rag or anything that would indicate she was cleaning. After a moment of gaping, I closed the distance between Ana and me and put my arm around her. “James,” I said, looking at Ana, rather than at him, “this is Ana. She just started coming to the house to babysit Hadley while I write.” I squeezed Ana’s shoulder. “Ana is a long time family friend. She used to be my husband’s grandparents’ caregiver years ago before they died, and we’ve stayed in touch,” I said.

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Americans could represent America’s future, some say

The Washington Post
2021-10-08

Silvia Foster-Frau, Multiculturalism reporter
Ted Mellnik
Adrián Blanco, Graphics reporter

Steve Majors, in Takoma Park, Md., who is half-Black and half-White, grew up in an all-Black household but is often perceived as White. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

While still a relatively small part of the population, more Americans than ever identify as multiracial, according to the census

Tony Luna was once again being asked to choose one of his racial identities over the other.

He firmly believed in the anti-racism training his workplace was offering. But the instructor told him he had to pick a group for the program — either the one for White people, or the one for people of color.

Luna is biracial, Filipino and White, a combination that defined his upbringing and sense of self. He has always felt he was either both identities, equally — or in some settings, not fully one or the other.

Multiracial populations increased faster than any single race across the U.S. in the last census. Gains were highest in major metro areas, but the number of people identifying as multiracial also tripled in non-metro areas. Source: 2020 Census

“I felt like it was a false choice, because you’re saying which one are you more comfortable with, your mom or your dad?” Luna, 49, said. “Identity can be based on how people see you, but that can be wrong for mixed people. It’s really based on how you identify, what your experiences are — so many variables go into that.”

More than 33 million Americans — about 1 in 10 — identify as being of two or more races, a number that grew by nearly 25 million people in the past decade, according to the 2020 Census. Multiracial people span all different combinations of races and ethnicities and make up the fastest-growing demographic in the country.

In some cities, the growth is stark. Almost 1.4 million more people each in Los Angeles and New York identified as multiracial in the 2020 Census compared with a decade ago, according to a Washington Post analysis. In Miami, nearly 1.6 million more did so…

Read the entire article here.

We Are Owed.

Grieveland
2021-07-29
98 pages
6 x 0.21 x 9 inches
ISBN: 978-1-7353527-6-3

Ariana Brown

We Are Owed. is the debut poetry collection of Ariana Brown, exploring Black relationality in Mexican and Mexican American spaces. Through poems about the author’s childhood in Texas and a trip to Mexico as an adult, Brown interrogates the accepted origin stories of Mexican identity. We Are Owed asks the reader to develop a Black consciousness by rejecting U.S., Chicano, and Mexican nationalism and confronting anti-Black erasure and empire-building. As Brown searches for other Black kin in the same spaces through which she moves, her experiences of Blackness are placed in conversation with the histories of formerly enslaved Africans in Texas and Mexico. Esteban Dorantes, Gaspar Yanga, and the author’s Black family members and friends populate the book as a protective and guiding force, building the “we” evoked in the title and linking Brown to all other African-descended peoples living in what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery.”

Op-Ed: Why did so few Latinos identify themselves as white in the 2020 census?

The Los Angeles Times
2021-09-09

Manuel Pastor, Distinguished Professor of Sociology
University of Southern California

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Florence Everline Professor of Sociology
University of Southern California

Under the category “white” on the 2020 census form, there were names of countries not usually associated with Latinos in Los Angeles. (John Roark / Idaho Post-Register)

The 2020 census results made a splash in mid-August with this clear message: A declining number of people in the United States identify themselves as white, and the shift is happening faster than many had predicted. But all the justified focus on the “browning” of America obscured a second storyline: the browning of Brown America.

Strikingly, the share of Latinos who identified their race as white in the 2020 census fell from about 53% in 2010 to about 20% in 2020; the share who identified as “other” rose from 37% to 42%, and the share identifying as two or more races jumped from 6% to 33%. These are big changes — ones that cannot be explained just by intermarriage and ones that challenge a narrative that Latinos will eventually assimilate into whiteness.

So what’s going on? Partly, the census shifts reflect a change in the way the government collects data. When it asked for race, the census in 2020 added prompts under the “white” category that included countries not associated with America’s Latino population. Still, the move away from “white” is so dramatic that it could be other factors as well — such as a xenophobic political climate that has made many Latinos aware that whiteness may not be easily within their reach…

Read the entire article here.

White supremacy, with a tan

CNN (Cable News Network)
2021-09-04

John Blake, Enterprise writer/producer

(CNN) Cutting taxes for the rich helps the poor. There is no such thing as a Republican or a Democratic judge. Climate change is a hoax.

Some political myths refuse to die despite all evidence the contrary. Here’s another:

When White people are no longer a majority, racism will fade and the US “will never be a White country again.”

This myth was reinforced recently when the US Census’ 2020 report revealed that people who identify as White alone declined for the first time since the Census began in 1790. The majority of Americans under 18 are now people of color, and people who identity as multiracial increased by 276% over the last decade.

These Census figures seemed to validate a common assumption: The US is barreling toward becoming a rainbow nation around 2045, when White people are projected to become a minority.

That year has been depicted as “a countdown to the White apocalypse,” and “dreadful” news for White supremacists.” Two commentators even predicted the US “White majority will soon disappear forever.” It’s now taken as a given that the “Browning of America” will lead to the erosion of White supremacy.

I used to believe those predictions. Now I have a different conclusion:

Don’t ever underestimate White supremacy’s ability to adapt.

The assumption that more racial diversity equals more racial equality is a dangerous myth. Racial diversity can function as a cloaking device, concealing the most powerful forms of White supremacy while giving the appearance of racial progress.

Racism will likely be just as entrenched in a browner America as it is now. It will still be White supremacy, with a tan…

Read the entire article here.

Between Heritage and Hate

palabra
2021-05-25

Alejandra Arevalo

Photo from the archive of Fabiana Chiu-Rinaldi.

For Latino Asians, waves of Coronavirus-fueled hate and violence present a seemingly unending threat. They’re also reminders of a strong, but complicated heritage

Ahki Hasegawa is glad the COVID-19 pandemic has everyone wearing masks, and not just to protect against the virus.

“The only Asian part about me is my face,” the 34-year-old nurse told palabra. “So if I were to just slap on some sunglasses, and then wear my mask, there’s no way anybody would assume that I’m Asian at all.”

As an American citizen of Mexican and Japanese descent, Hasegawa said she trembled when she ran into a recent “White Lives Matter” rally in Huntington Beach, California, while walking her dog. “I’m glad I have a dog. And I haven’t been going out unless I’m with the dog. I don’t own a gun, but I definitely thought about it for self defense.”

Hasegawa is part of an often-overlooked community of Latinos of Asian heritage who have endured the waves of anti-Asian hate spreading across the United States.

Believing the Latino community to be a homogenous group is an almost routine mistake in American society. The image of a light-skinned mestizo floods the media as the only face of Latinidad. But it bears repeating: Latino is an ethnicity that stems from many combinations of races…

Read the entire article here.