Mixed Race Studies

Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society

Indiana University Press
2012-08-16
336 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-253-00629-5

john a. powell, Professor of Law; Director Haas Diversity Research Center
University of California, Berkeley

Foreword by:

David R. Roediger, Kendrick Babcock Professor of History and African American Studies
University of Illinois

Renowned social justice advocate john a. powell persuasively argues that we have not achieved a post-racial society and that there is much work to do to redeem the American promise of inclusive democracy. Culled from a decade of writing about social justice and spirituality, these meditations on race, identity, and social policy provide an outline for laying claim to our shared humanity and a way toward healing ourselves and securing our future. Racing to Justice challenges us to replace attitudes and institutions that promote and perpetuate social suffering with those that foster relationships and a way of being that transcends disconnection and separation.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Moving Beyond the Isolated Self
• I. Race and Racialization
  • 1. Post-Racialism or Targeted Universalism?
  • 2. The Colorblind Multiracial Dilemma: Racial Categories Reconsidered
  • 3. The Racing of American Society: Race Functioning as a Verb Before Signifying as a Noun
• II. White Privilege
  • 4. Whites Will Be Whites: The Failure to Interrogate Racial Privilege
  • 5. White Innocence and the Courts: Jurisprudential Devices that Obscure Privilege
• III. The Racialized Self
  • 6. Dreaming of a Self Beyond Whiteness and Isolation
  • 7. The Multiple Self: Implications for Law and Social Justice
• IV. Engagement
  • 8. Lessons from Suffering: How Social Justice Informs Spirituality
• Afterword
• References
• Index

Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India: Changing Concepts of Hybridity Across Empires

Routledge
2012-02-29
208 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-50429-4

Adrian Carton
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney, Australia

This book traces changing concepts of mixed-race identity in early colonial India by contrasting Portuguese, British and French colonial spaces. Starting in the sixteenth century, the author shows how the emergence of race was always shaped by affiliations based on religion, class, national identity, gender and citizenship across empires. In the context of increasing British power, the central core of the book looks at the Anglo-French tensions of the eighteenth century to consider the relationship between modernity and race-making. Arguing that different forms of modernity produced divergent categories of hybridity, the book considers the impact of changing political structures on mixed-race communities. With its emphasis on specificity, it situates current and past debates on the mixed-race experience and the politics of whiteness in broader historical and global contexts.

The book contributes to the understanding of race-making as an aspect of colonial governance, and it illuminates some margins of colonial India that are often lost in the shadows of the British regime. It is of interest to academics interested in world/global history, postcolonial studies, South Asian imperial history and critical mixed-race studies.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Portuguese Legacies
3. Race and Reform
4. Contested Colonialisms
5. French Complexions
6. Race and Fraternity
7. Conclusion

Brazil Approves University Affirmative Action Bill

Associated Press
2012-08-08

Stan Lehman

San Paulo—The Brazilian Senate has approved an affirmative action bill that reserves half the spots in federal universities for high school graduates of public schools, and distributes them according to the racial makeup of each state.

The Senate’s news agency says the bill that was approved late Tuesday now goes to President Dilma Rousseff, who is expected to approve it.

The reserved spots will be distributed among black, mixed race and indigenous students proportionally to the racial composition of each state, the official agency said…

…The Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that it was constitutional for universities to use racial quotas.

Brazil has more citizens of African ancestry than any nation other than Nigeria. Fifty-one percent of Brazil’s 192 million people are black or of mixed-race,

Backers say the use of scholarships, quotas and other policies aimed at getting more blacks and mixed-race Brazilians into universities is needed to right the historic wrongs of slavery, centuries of stark economic inequality and a society in which whites are overwhelmingly in leadership roles in government and business…

Read the entire article here.

Shades of Passing (AAS 340 / ENG 391 / AMS 340)

Princeton University
Fall 2012-2013

Anne A. Cheng, Professor of English and African American Studies

This course studies the trope of passing in 20th century American literary and cinematic narratives in an effort to re-examine the crisis of identity that both produces and confounds acts of passing. We will examine how American novelists and filmmakers have portrayed and responded to this social phenomenon, not as merely a social performance but as a profound intersubjective process embedded within history, law, and culture. We will focus on narratives of passing across axes of difference, invoking questions such as: To what extent does the act of passing reinforce or unhinge seemingly natural categories of race, gender, and sexuality?

Sample reading list:
William Faulkner, Light in August
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Nella Larsen, Passing
Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life
Douglas Sirk (director), Imitation of Life (film, 1959)
Woody Allen (director), Zelig (film, 1983)

Mississippi Black Code (1865)

America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics After The Civil War
Digital History: using new technologies to enhance teaching and research
2011

The Civil Rights of Freedmen in Mississippi (Approved November 25, 1865)

Section 1. Be it enacted by the legislature of the State of Mississippi, That all freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes may sue and be sued, implead and be impleaded in all the courts of law and equity of this state, and may acquire personal property and choses in action, by descent or purchase, any may dispose of the same, in the same manner, and to the same extent that white persons may: Provided that the provisions of this section shall not be so construed as to allow any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto to rent or lease any lands or tenements, except in incorporated town or cities in which places the corporate authorities shall control the same.

Sec. 2. Be it further enacted, That all freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes may intermarry with each other, in the same manner and under the same regulations that are provided by law for white persons: Provided, that the clerk of probate shall keep separate records of the same.

Sec. 3. Be it further enacted, That all freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes, who do now and have heretofore lived and cohabited together as husband and wife shall be taken and held in law as legally married, and the issue shall be taken and held as legitimate for all purposes. That it shall not be lawful for any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto to intermarry with any white person; nor for any white person to intermarry with any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto; any person who shall so intermarry shall be deemed guilty of felony and, on conviction thereof, shall be confined in the state penitentiary for life; and those shall be deemed freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes who are of pure Negro blood, and those descended from a Negro to the third generation inclusive, though one ancestor of each generation may have been a white person…

Read the entire code here.

Unsuitable Suitors: Anti-Miscegenation Laws, Naturalization Laws, and the Construction of Asian Identities

Law & Society Review
Volume 41, Issue 3 (September 2007)
pages 587–618
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5893.2007.00315.x

Deenesh Sohoni, Associate Professor of Sociology
The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia

In this article, I use state-level anti-miscegenation legislation to examine how Asian ethnic groups became categorized within the American racial system in the period between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. I show how the labels used to describe Asian ethnic groups at the state level reflected and were constrained by national-level debates regarding the groups eligible for U.S. citizenship. My main point is that Asian ethnic groups originally were viewed as legally distinct—racially and ethnically, and that members of these groups recognized and used these distinctions to seek social rights and privileges. The construction of “Asian” as a social category resulted primarily from congressional legislation and judicial rulings that linked immigration with naturalization regulations. Anti-miscegenation laws further contributed to the social exclusion of those of Asian ancestry by grouping together U.S.-born and foreign-born Asians.

Read or purchase the article here.

Equality Trouble: Sameness and Difference in Twentieth-Century Race Law

California Law Review
Volume 88, Issue 6 (2000)
pages 1923-2015

Angela P. Harris, Professor of Law
University of California, Davis

In this Essay, Professor Harris suggests that “race law” consists not only of antidiscrimination law, but law pertaining to the formation, recognition, and maintenance of racial groups, as well as the law regulating the relationships among these groups. Harris argues that a constant tension in the story of race law in the past century has been the effort to reconcile constitutional and statutory norms of equality with the desire for white dominance. In the first part of the century, it was assumed that the fact of racial difference required management through sound public policy; in the second part of the century, race gradually became understood as an arbitrary distinction that the law should ignore. Neither treating race as difference nor as sameness, however, has succeeded in accomplishing racial justice.

Read the entire article here.

Administering Identity: The Determination of Race in Race-Conscious Law

California Law Review
Volume 82, Issue 5 (1994)
pages 1231-1285

Christopher A. Ford

Modern American anti-discrimination law seeks to remedy the effects of racial and ethnic prejudice by ensuring equality in areas such as political access and employment opportunity. In this effort, the concept of race is central both to identifying and to rectifying the effects of prejudice. Various economic and social benefits, for example, are awarded based upon injuries and solutions defined with reference to racial categories. Race and ethnicity, however, are today recognized as being largely social constructs with little empirical or scientific basis. This dichotomy between the importance of race classification to anti-discrimination law and its fundamental indeterminacy creates what the author calls a core dilemma of modem race-conscious law: the difficulties of how we “administer race.” He explores two related questions bearing on this dilemma. How should the law-indeed, can the law-intelligibly define the nature and boundaries of the groups to whom remedial preferences are addressed? Furthermore, can the law “accurately” sort individuals into these groups once they have been defined? The author explores the approaches several different group conscious programs and legal regimes have taken in attempting to deal with these questions, from methods employed in sex and Native American classification to the systems of classification used in the Jim Crow South, in modem India and in South Africa during the apartheid era.

Read the entire article here.

The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race: The Normal Science of American Racial Thought

California Law Review
Volume 85, Issue 5 (1997)
pages 1213-1258

Juan F. Perea, Cone, Wagner, Nugent, Johnson, Hazouri & Roth Professor of Law
University of Florida

This Article is about how we are taught to think about race. In particular, I intend to analyze the role of books and texts on race in structuring our racial discourse. I believe that much writing on racism is structured by a paradigm that is widely held but rarely recognized for what it is and what it does. This paradigm shapes our understanding of what race and racism mean and the nature of our discussions about race. It is crucial, therefore, to identify and describe this paradigm and to demonstrate how it binds and organizes racial discourse, limiting both the scope and the range of legitimate viewpoints in that discourse.

In this Article, I identify and criticize one of the most salient features of past and current discourse about race in the United States, the Black/White binary paradigm of race. A small but growing number of writers have recognized the paradigm and its limiting effect on racial discourse. I believe that its dominant and pervasive character has not been well established nor discussed in legal literature.

I intend to demonstrate the existence of a Black/White paradigm and to show its breadth and seemingly pervasive ordering of racial discourse and legitimacy. Further, I intend to show how the Black/White binary paradigm operates to exclude Latinos/as from full membership and participation in racial discourse, and how that exclusion serves to perpetuate not only the paradigm itself but also negative stereotypes of Latinos/as. Full membership in society for Latinos/as will require a paradigm shift away from the binary paradigm and towards a new and evolving understanding of race and race relations.

This Article illustrates the kind of contribution to critical theory that the emergent Latino Critical Race Studies (LatCrit) movement may make. This movement is a continuing scholarly effort, undertaken by Latino/a scholars and other sympathetic scholars, to examine critically existing structures of racial thought and to identify how these structures perpetuate the subordinated position of Latinos/as in particular. LatCrit studies are, then, an extension and development of critical race theory (and critical theory generally) that focus on the previously neglected areas of Latino/a identity and history and the role of racism as it affects Latinos/as.

I identify strongly, and self-consciously, as a Latino writer and thinker. It is precisely my position as a Latino outsider, neither Black nor White, that makes possible the observation and critique presented in this Article. My critique of the Black/White binary paradigm of race shows this commonly held binary understanding of race to be one of the major impediments to learning about and understanding Latinos/as and their history. As I shall show, the paradigm also creates significant distortions in the way people learn to view Latinos/as.

I begin with a review of the principal scientific theory that describes the nature of paradigms and the power they exert over the formation of  knowledge. I then analyze important, nationally recognized books on race to reveal the binary paradigm of race and the way it structures race thinking. After reviewing these popular and scholarly books on race, I analyze a leading casebook on constitutional law. Like other books, textbooks on constitutional law are shaped by the paradigm and reproduce it. Then, by describing some of the legal struggles Latinos/as have waged, I will demonstrate that paradigmatic presentations of race and struggles for equality have caused significant omissions with undesirable repercussions. Thus, I demonstrate the important role that legal history can play in both correcting and amplifying the Black/White binary paradigm of race…

…In his chapter on “Malcolm X and Black Rage” [Cornel] West describes Malcolm X’s fear of cultural hybridity, the blurring of racial boundaries that occurs because of racial mixture. Malcolm X saw such hybridity, exemplified by mulattoes, as “symbols of  weakness and confusion.” West’s commentary on Malcolm X’s views gives us another statement of the binary paradigm: “The very idea of not ‘fitting in’ the U.S. discourse of positively valued whiteness and negatively debased blackness meant one was subject to exclusion and marginalization by whites and blacks.” Although the context of this quotation is about Black/White mulattoes, West’s observation is crucial to an understanding of why Latinos/as, neither claiming to be, nor being, White or Black, are perpetually excluded and marginalized. The reified binary structure of discourse on race leaves no room for people of color who do not fit the rigid Black and White boxes supplied by the paradigm. Furthermore, most Latinos/as are mixed race mestizos or mulattoes, who therefore embody the kind of racial mixture that Malcolm X, and, I would argue, society generally tends to reject. West’s observation about mixed-race people who do not fit within traditional U.S. discourse about race applies in full measure to Latinos/as…

Read the entire article here.

Black Like Obama: What the Junior Illinois Senator’s Appearance on the National Scene Reveals About Race in America, and Where We Should Go from Here

Thurgood Marshall Law Review
Volume 31 (2005)
pages 79-100

Amos N. Jones, Professor of Law
Campbell University, Raleigh, North Carolina

Given Americans’ warm bipartisan response to Senator Barack Obama’s keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the realist is constrained to applaud with them. The fact that voters of all ethnicities enthusiastically back a man apparently black who, at first glance, is fairly critical of the status quo indicates that the country is more open-minded than it used to be. Once the applause has subsided, however, the realist is further constrained to take a hard look at the facts as opposed to the rhetoric accompanying Obama’s stardom. His globetrotting memoir and media appearances, while uplifting and entertaining, have proved unsatisfactory in delivering the obviously critical thinker’s original answer to the big question that has remained unaddressed since the euphoria of 2004, when numerous journalists proclaimed Obama the new black political hope: When, how, and why did Barack Obama become black?

This essay contextualizes Obama’s popular personal story within the messy legal and social framework created by centuries of slavery and Jim Crow segregation in America. It opens with a summary of Obama’s identity as presented in his autobiography republished in 2004 and proceeds through a specific review of racial classifications in American legal history, raising the question whether Obama should even be counted as a black man. After explaining the history of the “one-drop rule” given legal force by a rarely considered holding of Plessy v. Ferguson that remains good law even today, the essay criticizes the thoughtless imposition of the black label upon Obama, suggesting possible reasons for his allowing Americans to minimize or ignore his substantially more dominant white heritage. Without suggesting specific regimes for categorization, the essay concludes by arguing that the time has come for public and private law to recognize different degrees of blackness, especially now that the country’s census allows Americans to categorize themselves in more than one racial group…

Read the entire article here.