Mixed Race Studies

Middle Eastern and North African Americans may not be perceived, nor perceive themselves, to be White

PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States
Volume 119, Number 7, e2117940119
2022-02-15
9 pages
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2117940119

Neda Maghbouleh, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Toronto

René D. Flores, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Chicago

Ariela Schachter, Assistant Professor of Sociology​; Faculty Affiliate in Asian American Studies
Washington University in St. Louis, Saint Louis, Missouri

Significance

The US government’s classification of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Americans as White means there is no direct way to numerically count members of this group in official statistics. Therefore, any potential disparities and inequalities faced by MENA Americans remain hidden. Nevertheless, we find that MENA Americans may not be perceived, nor perceive themselves, to be White. These findings underscore the minoritized status of MENA Americans and support the inclusion of a new MENA identity category in the US Census. This would allow researchers to examine the social, economic, and health status of this growing population and empower community advocates to ameliorate existing inequalities.

Abstract

People of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) descent are categorized as non-White in many Western countries but counted as White on the US Census. Yet, it is not clear that MENA people see themselves or are seen by others as White. We examine both sides of this ethnoracial boundary in two experiments. First, we examined how non-MENA White and MENA individuals perceive the racial status of MENA traits (external categorization), and then, how MENA individuals identify themselves (self-identification). We found non-MENA Whites and MENAs consider MENA-related traits—including ancestry, names, and religion—to be MENA rather than White. Furthermore, when given the option, most MENA individuals self-identify as MENA or as MENA and White, particularly second-generation individuals and those who identify as Muslim. In addition, MENAs who perceive more anti-MENA discrimination are more likely to embrace a MENA identity, which suggests that perceived racial hostility may be activating a stronger group identity. Our findings provide evidence about the suitability of adding a separate MENA label to the race/ethnicity identification question in the US Census, and suggest MENAs’ official designation as White may not correspond to their lived experiences nor to others’ perceptions. As long as MENA Americans remain aggregated with Whites, potential inequalities they face will remain hidden.

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5 Years After Muslim Ban, Middle Eastern and North African Americans Remain Hidden | Opinion

Newsweek
2022-02-08

Neda Maghbouleh, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Toronto

René D. Flores, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Chicago

Ariela Schachter, Assistant Professor of Sociology​; Faculty Affiliate in Asian American Studies
Washington University in St. Louis, Saint Louis, Missouri

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

Five years ago, President Donald Trump was sued over the Muslim ban, which prohibited immigration and travel to the United States from seven majority Muslim countries. Although it is impossible to know how many lives were thrown into disarray by the flick of President Donald Trump’s pen, at least 41,000 people were denied visas based solely on their nationality. An overwhelming majority—94 percent—were people from Iran, Syria and Yemen.

President Joe Biden, like other critics of the ban, proclaimed that those affected “were the first to feel Donald Trump’s assault on Black and brown people.” But since a 1944 lawsuit in which a Arab Muslim man successfully argued that he was white in order to become a naturalized citizen, people from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA, which includes Iran, Syria and Yemen) have been counted as white in the U.S. As a result, and unlike other minorities, an estimated 3 million MENA Americans do not have a box to mark their identities on the Census or most surveys. And when MENA Americans are masked under the white category, the everyday group- and individual-level inequalities they face are made invisible, making clear that adding a MENA box to the U.S. Census is long overdue…

Read the entire article here.

2022 CMRS Conference Is Two Weeks Away!

Critical Mixed Race Studies Association
2022-01-24

*** View the program schedule here! ***

REGISTER NOW!
It is not too late to register for the 6th biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference titled Ancestral Futurisms: Embodying Multiracialities Past, Present, and Future to be held virtually February 24-26, 2022. To register, click here.

BECOME AN EXHIBITOR
For a small $10 fee you can advertise your business and/or sell your wares during the CMRS Conference in our virtual exhibitor space. Register here.

BECOME A CONFERENCE SPONSOR
It’s not too late to become a 2022 CMRS conference sponsor. Sponsors receive advertisement on the conference website, free registration for students or community members, and conference merchandise featuring the brilliant art image “Transition” by artivist Favianna Rodriguez.

To become a sponsor please go to our Eventbrite page here.

NEW! View the program guide here.

The Galton Society for the Study of the Origin and Evolution of Man (1918–1935)

The Embryo Project Encyclopedia
2021-06-03

Aliya R. Hoff, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology
Arizona State University

Charles Benedict Davenport, Madison Grant, and Henry Fairfield Osborn founded the Galton Society for the Study of the Origin and Evolution of Man, or the Galton Society, in New York City, New York, in 1918. The Galton Society was a scientific society that promoted the study of humans in terms of race in service to the US eugenics movement. The Galton Society was named in honor of Francis Galton who first coined the term eugenics in 1883. Galton and other eugenics proponents claimed that the human species could improve through selective breeding that restricted who could have children. Some of the society members were scientists from a wide range of disciplines who supported the now disproven notion that fundamental biological differences exist between races that may justify the control of human reproduction. The Galton Society drew on the scientific credibility and influence of its members to advocate for eugenics programs, such as immigration restriction laws, in the US…

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Race is a Social Construct

Center for Health Progress
2017-10-24

Sarah McAfee
Golden, Colorado

On a recent road trip with my sister, a doctor, we were talking about how race is a social construct. (We’re not the best conversationalists.) She asked, “If there’s no biological basis for race, then why do some medications work better for people of some races than others?” Which is a good question. Since we had a long drive ahead of us, I stalled by pointing out the window at a pretend elk and changed the subject, then did some furious Googling when we stopped for gas.

For hundreds of years, we’ve been told that each race is a discrete group of people defined by specific genetic and biological differences. As a result, we’ve used race as a way of explaining observed differences in health: Sickle Cell Anemia is considered a black person disease; Cystic Fibrosis is considered a white person disease; we’ve said people of color are genetically pre-disposed to diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, and other chronic conditions; the FDA has approved drugs for different races; and through “race-based medicine” we’ve established care standards (such as responding to patients’ pain) that vary by race. But it’s all wrong…

Read the entire article here.

Pauli Murray applied to be a Supreme Court justice in 1971. 50 years later, a Black woman could make history.

The Washington Post
2022-01-27

Anne Branigin

The trailblazing lawyer wrote President Nixon to do something “unprecedented”

When Pauli Murray wrote to President Richard Nixon in September 1971, the trailblazing lawyer, activist, writer and scholar held no illusions about how the letter would be received.

The 60-year-old constitutional lawyer was writing to Nixon to “do something which may be unprecedented in the history of the USA”: to directly apply, as a self-identified “Negro woman,” for a seat on the Supreme Court.

“By the time this letter reaches the White House, I suspect you will have announced your choice to fill the vacancy left by Mr. Justice Hugo L. Black’s resignation,” Murray wrote. “Since I do not expect you to see this letter, it does no harm to amuse your administrative and secretarial staff as it passes up and down the line on its way to the waste basket.”

But while Murray may have taken a tongue-in-cheek tone, the ultimate aim of the letter was a serious one…

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Passing for Racial Democracy

The Baffler
2021-12-06

Stephanie Reist

The complexities of the color line in the U.S. and Brazil

A CENTRAL POINT OF TENSION between Irene Redfield (played by Tessa Thompson) and her husband Dr. Brian Redfield (André Holland) in Rebecca Hall’s Passing, based on the Nella Larsen novel of the same name, is whether their family should remain in the United States. While Irene can pass for white out of convenience, the same is not true of her darker sons and her husband, who routinely informs his children about lynchings and white violence. Irene disapproves of this talk, despite her work for the Negro Welfare League. In one pivotal scene, she drives her tired husband home after a long day of visiting patients, and the couple discuss going to South America, specifically mentioning Brazil. The issue returns when the couple fights over the consuming role that Clare (Ruth Negga)—who has chosen to pass as white to the point of marrying a bigoted white husband and having a daughter with him—exerts in their lives and marriage.

In Larsen’s novel, Brian’s longing for Brazil, which becomes conflated with what Irene perceives as his desire for the effervescent, delightfully dangerous Clare, is even more pronounced: Brazil is the one that got away, Brian’s lost hope for a society where he and other black members of the talented tenth could be judged by their merits, not lynched because they failed to stay in their place. Irene even implicitly sanctions an affair between her husband and Clare to assuage her guilt for denying her family the chance to be truly “happy, or free, or safe”—a state she laments as impossible when speaking to Clare about her choice not to pass…

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Americans Color Outside the Lines

The Dispatch
2021-04-26

Chris Stirewalt, Contributing Editor

Even today, bigots and the progressive proponents of race science hold fast to the idea of fixed race and ethnicity. Thankfully, Americans largely ignore them.

In his autobiography, Life on the Color Line, Gregory Williams tells the story of discovering at the age of 10 that he was black—or at least that the world saw him that way.

Williams, who would go on to serve as president of both City College of New York and the University of Cincinnati, was raised as a white boy when and where it really mattered: rural, central Virginia in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But when his parents’ marriage broke up and his mom ran off, his no-account, alcoholic father could not manage to care for his two sons. So, Williams’ dad moved them to his hometown of Muncie, Indiana. It was on the bus trip there that Williams’ dad told his boys that he was not the Italian-American called “Tony” who ran a roadhouse west of Richmond but a light-skinned black man from the wrong side of tracks in the industrial Midwest. “Miss Sallie,” the black woman who had worked at the family bar for a time, was really the boys’ grandmother.

Ultimately abandoned by both of his parents, Williams found himself brutally rejected by both cultures. And what a time to live on that line. In 1954, the year after he arrived in Muncie, the Supreme Court struck down school segregation laws. Segregationists had warned after Harry Truman integrated the military six years earlier that the federal government was intent on the mixing of the races—and ultimately making intermarriage appear to be normal, leading to the dilution of the white race. The blending of children in classrooms was to them just the next step in the demise of America’s dominant white culture by miscegenation. Williams remembered a Klansman on television saying the court was trying to encourage race mixing and the rise of the “bestial mongrel mulatto, the dreg of human society.”…

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Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century

University of North Carolina Press
December 2021
408 pages
49 halftones, notes, bibl., index
6.125 x 9.25
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-6460-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-6461-3

Yunxiang Gao, Professor of history
Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

This book explores the close relationships between three of the most famous twentieth-century African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, and their little-known Chinese allies during World War II and the Cold War—journalist, musician, and Christian activist Liu Liangmo, and Sino-Caribbean dancer-choreographer Sylvia Si-lan Chen. Charting a new path in the study of Sino-American relations, Gao Yunxiang foregrounds African Americans, combining the study of Black internationalism and the experiences of Chinese Americans with a transpacific narrative and an understanding of the global remaking of China’s modern popular culture and politics. Gao reveals earlier and more widespread interactions between Chinese and African American leftists than accounts of the familiar alliance between the Black radicals and the Maoist Chinese would have us believe. The book’s multilingual approach draws from massive yet rarely used archival streams in China and in Chinatowns and elsewhere in the United States. These materials allow Gao to retell the well-known stories of Du Bois, Robeson, and Hughes alongside the sagas of Liu and Chen in a work that will transform and redefine Afro-Asia studies.

Table of Contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Africa, Arise! Face the Rising Sun! W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois
• 2. Arise! Ye Who Refuse to Be Bond Slaves! Paul Robeson, “the Black King of Songs”
• 3. Transpacific Mass Singing, Journalism, and Christian Activism: Liu Liangmo
• 4. Choreographing Ethnicity, War, and Revolution around the Globe: Sylvia Si-lan Chen Leyda
• 5. Roar, China! Langston Hughes, Poet Laureate of the Negro Race
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Marginal Citizens: Interracial intimacies and the incarceration of Japanese Canadians, 1942–1949

Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société
Published online 2021-09-08
DOI: 10.1017/cls.2021.18

Mary Anne Vallianatos, Ph.D. Candidate
University of Victoria School of Law, British Columbia

Following Japan’s 1941 attacks on Hawai’i and Hong Kong, Canada relocated, detained, and exiled citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry. Many interracial families, however, were exempted from this racial project called the internment. The form of the exemption was an administrative permit granted to its holder on the basis of their marital or patrilineal proximity to whiteness. This article analyzes these permits relying on archival research and applying a critical race feminist lens to explore how law was constitutive of race at this moment in Canadian history. I argue that the permits recategorized interracial intimacies towards two racial ends: to differentiate the citizen from the “enemy alien”; and to regulate the interracial family according to patriarchal common law principles. This article nuances received narratives of law as an instrument of racial exclusion by documenting the way in which a new inclusive state measure sustained old exclusions.

Read or purchase the article here.