Mixed Race Studies

Fitting Into the Right Box: Multiracial America on the Rise

Brown Political Review
2013-10-18

Meg Sullivan

As swimmer Michael Phelps knows, one of the highest priorities of food corporations is maintaining their squeaky clean mainstream appeal. This usually involves companies giving wide berth to any manner of controversy, but Cheerios ignored this policy four months ago. In June, the cereal company released a 30 second television commercial that featured a mixed race married couple. The only detail of the ad that deviated from standard cereal advertisement conventions was black man and white woman actors playing the parents in the all-American family.

Whether or not Cheerios predicted the commotion their commercial would cause, we don’t know. Regardless, the ad first met backlash–negative reactions drove YouTube to disable comments on the online video–but then an overwhelming show of support from Americans. The multiracial community applauded Cheerios for depicting a family on television that looked more like theirs.

Aside from generating good publicity for Cheerios, the advertisement has drawn attention to the growing number of mixed race marriages and multiracial children in the United States. In 2010, 8.4 percent of all marriages were between individuals of a different race or ethnicity…

Read the entire article here.

Despite Options on Census, Many to Check ‘Black’ Only

The New York Times
2000-02-12

Diana Jean Schemo

This year’s new, racially inclusive census might have seemed tailor made for Michael Gelobter.

The son of a white Jewish father and an African-Bermudan mother, Mr. Gelobter lives in Harlem with his wife, Sharron Williams, a black woman whose Caribbean background melds African and Indian influences. Creating their own cultural road map as they go, the couple embrace the range of their heritages and those of friends, marking Passover, for example, with an African-American Latino seder.

But when the census invites Mr. Gelobter, for the first time, to name all the races that describe him, he will do what he has always done, and claim just one: black. Checking more than one race, he contends, would undermine the influence of blacks by reducing their number as a distinct group and so most likely diluting public policies addressing their concerns.

The census forms that will be mailed to most Americans in April—the count began last month in Alaska, where the winter chill tends to keep people at home and easier to tally —offers a nod to the nation’s increasing diversity. No longer will the Census Bureau instruct respondents to ”select one” race to describe themselves. Instead, it will tell them to mark one or more of 14 boxes representing 6 races (and subcategories) that apply—white, black, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian Indian, other Asian and Pacific Islander—or to check ”some other race.”

But like Mr. Gelobter, many people, indeed most, who could claim more than one race are not expected to do so, demographers and census officials say.

Part of the reason, according to demographers, is habit: Americans are simply unaccustomed to the option. More profoundly, however, the change is fueling a weighty debate about the meaning of race, in which interpretations of history, politics and experience frequently overshadow the simpler matter of parentage.

Thirty years after Loving v. Virginia struck down the last laws barring interracial marriage, the new change in the census and the ensuing controversy have become a barometer of the complexity of American attitudes toward race, and their contradictions. With the 6 racial categories offering 63 possible combinations of racial identity, which government demographers will tabulate as distinct groups, the census could provide a remarkably meticulous racial profile of American society.

On one side of the debate stand those who see the revision as a tactic to divide blacks at a time when affirmative action and other remedies to discrimination are under attack. Opposing them are multiracial Americans who resent having to identify with just one part of their heritage.

Apart from his perception that the change could diminish blacks’ influence, Mr. Gelobter, a 38-year-old professor of environmental policy at Rutgers University, said that claiming a multiracial identity would link him to a bitter, freighted history of privilege for blacks who could cite some white lineage.

“Should Frederick Douglass have checked white and black?” Mr. Gelobter said. ”Should W. E. B. Du Bois have checked white and black? He practically looked white.”…

…Kerry Ann Rockquemore, a sociologist at Pepperdine University, polled 250 college students who had one black parent and one white, and found that those reared in middle-class or affluent white neighborhoods tended to identify as biracial, while those who had grown up in black communities generally considered themselves black.

How will nonblacks of mixed race answer the census? There is little more than anecdotal evidence. But some experts note that checking options like Asian and white, or American Indian and Pacific Islander, does not carry the same historical baggage that mixed-race blacks confront in deciding whether to say they are part white.

Scott Wasmuth, who is white and has a Filipino wife, said that when he filled out the census in 1990, he ignored the one-race-only rule that then prevailed and checked both white and Asian to describe his daughters. This year he will do the same. ”People are beginning to say, ‘I’m a mixture, and I don’t have to choose one or the other,’ ” he said.

Bertrand Wade, a 34-year-old industrial electronics technician from Brooklyn, wishes he could avoid descriptions altogether. His father is half-black and half-white, and his mother is East Indian and white.

When applications ask his race and none of the boxes fit, Mr. Wade said, ”the first thing I feel is excluded; then sometimes I feel that I should not be in a position where I have to state my race.” He said that on the census, he would check all the boxes that describe his heritage.

Charles Byrd, who runs a Web site called Inter Racial Voice, said, ”What we need to do as a country is get rid of these stupid boxes altogether.”

On the 1990 census, about 10 million Americans seemed to agree. They did not identify themselves as members of any race, said Margo J. Anderson, author of ”The American Census: A Social History” (Yale University Press, 1988). Another quarter-million, ignoring the instructions, identified themselves as belonging to more than one race.

Ms. Anderson said that ever since the first head count, in 1790, the census had played an important if subtle role in reflecting preoccupations and shaping social thought. It is only in the last century, though, that the government has devised questions to identify the country’s ethnic makeup. In the 1910 census, for instance, the government asked people their mother tongue, looking for Yiddish as the answer in order to tally the number of Jewish immigrants.

”The changes in questions always come about because of the social issues of the day,” Ms. Anderson said.

Susan Graham, head of Project RACE, a civic group that unsuccessfully pushed for a separate ”multiracial” box for the census, said she wanted a single category that would accurately define her children.

”Think of when you open a newspaper and see pie charts,” she said. ”We wanted a slice of the pie that says ‘multiracial.’ ”…

Read the entire article here.

A Fresh Face On Race

The Hartford Courant
Hartford, Connecticut
2001-03-13

Mike Swift, Courant Staff Writer

The U.S. Census Bureau’s New Approach And The Latest Population Figures Could Mark ‘The Beginning Of The End Of Racial Classification In America.’

The federal government Monday pegged the number of Americans who are of multiple races at 6.8 million—about twice the size of Connecticut’s population—as for the first time ever the U.S. Census identified people who belong to more than one racial category.

Although their share of the U.S. population was a relatively small 2.4 percent, the population of people who claimed a multiple racial identity could have significance beyond their numbers in a society that diversified rapidly during the 1990s.

“It’s really a major step,” said Kerry Rockquemore, a University of Connecticut professor who is writing a book called, “Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America.”

“In the past, we’ve thought of race as being these mutually exclusive, biologically real categories that people fit into,” said Rockquemore, who is biracial herself. “And when you insert that option of `check all that apply,’ that blows that out of the water.”

“Today,” said Charles Byrd, editor and publisher of The Interracial Voice, an Internet magazine for multiracial people, “was the beginning of the end of racial classification in America.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Correspondence Between Interracial Births and Multiple-Race Reporting

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 92, Number 12 (December 2002)
pages 1976–1981

Jennifer D. Parker, PhD
Office of Analysis, Epidemiology, and Health Promotion
National Center for Health Statistics, Hyattsville, Maryland

Jennifer H. Madans, PhD, OD Co-Deputy Director / OD Associate Director for Science / OPBL Associate Director
Office of Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Laboratory Services
Centers for Disease Control

• Objectives. Race-specific health statistics are routinely reported in scientific publications; most describe health disparities across groups. Census 2000 showed that 2.4% of the US population identifies with more than 1 race group. We examined the hypothesis that multiple-race reporting is associated with interracial births by comparing parental race reported on birth certificates with reported race in a national health survey.
• Methods. US natality data from 1968 through 1998 and National Health Interview Survey data from 1990 through 1998 were compared, by year of birth.
• Results. Overall multiple-race survey responses correspond to expectations from interracial births. However, there are discrepancies for specific multiple-race combinations.
• Conclusions. Projected estimates of the multiple-race population can be only partially informed by vital records. (Am J Public Health. 2002;92:1976–1981)

Eliminating racial disparities is an important national health objective; as a result, many policy and summary reports report race-specific health statistics to monitor trends and identify problem areas. Scientific research papers analyze race-specific data in hopes of understanding the disparities and, ultimately, finding ways to reduce them.

In 1997, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a revision to the long-standing directive for the collection of race and ethnicity data within the federal statistical system, known as OMB-15. Among other modifications designed to reflect the changing racial and ethnic profile in the United States, the 1997 standard requires that new data collections allow individuals to report 1 or more race groups when responding to a query on their racial identity. Analysts examining previously available data hypothesized that up to 2% of respondents to surveys or administrative collections would report 2 or more groups under the new standard. About 2.4% of the US population, nearly 7 million people, reported 2 or more race groups in the 2000 decennial census.

The impact of multiple-race reporting on statistics used for health policy and research is not yet known. It is likely that multiple-race respondents differ from each other and from their single-race counterparts on many measures of health and access to care. The extent of these differences will depend on many factors. All considered, multiple-race reporting will influence public health policy for both the newly tabulated multiple-race groups and the remaining single-race groups, which will be changed as a result of a wider choice of racial identification. Interracial births have increased over the past 3 decades. In the early 1970s, 1.4% of infants were born to parents who reported different race groups; by 1998, this percentage had increased to 4.3%. It would be reasonable to assume that individuals with parents of different races would identify with and report more than 1 group when responding to surveys and other data collections. However, how interracial births affect multiple-race reporting is unclear.

This report compares year- and race-specific national estimates of interracial births with year-specific survey estimates of multiple-race reporting. We compared the distribution of parental race for births from 1968 through 1998 with the reporting of more than 1 race for survey respondents in the 1990–1998 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) who were born from 1968 through 1998. If all individuals with interracial parents reported both race groups on the survey, we would expect the distribution of multiple-race responses on the NHIS to coincide with the distribution of interracial births from birth records for the appropriate age–year combination. For example, the race distribution for births in 1970 would correspond to the race reported among the respondents who were aged 20 years in the 1990 NHIS, who were 21 in the 1991 NHIS, and so on. We would also expect that the inclusion of individuals with 1 or both parents who themselves identify with more than 1 race group may increase the percentages of multiple-race responses in the NHIS even more. Although neither the NHIS nor the birth certificate were developed to provide national race distributions, both data sources are routinely used to provide national estimates of races-specific health outcomes…

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Interracial births in Baltimore, 1950-1964

Public Health Reports
Volume 81, Number 11 (November 1966)
pages 967-971

Sidney M. Norton, Director of the Bureau of Vital Records
Baltimore City Health Department, Baltimore, Maryland

Also Assistant, Department of Chronic Diseases
School of Hygiene and Public Health
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

During the course of routine, periodic examinations of birth certificates for accuracy and completeness, the Bureau of Vital Records in the Baltimore City Health Department has observed an increasing number of interracial births in Baltimore from year to year over the past decade. Although such births do not occur in large numbers, they are indicative of a contemporary social phenomenon which is taking place in numerous U.S. urban areas.

In Baltimore this social phenomenon is manifested by children born to white and Negro parents, white and Filipino parents, and white and oriental parents. These children represent the legitimate issue of interracial marriages and, to a lesser extent, the natural offspring of unwed parents.

The bona fide interracial unions are of special interest because Maryland law prohibits the intermarriage of a white person and a Negro to the third generation, a white person and a member of the Malay race, and a Negro to the third generation and a member of the Malay race. (On March 28, 1966, the Maryland House of Delegates defeated a bill previously passed by the State Senate to repeal the 305-year-old law prohibiting white-Negro marriages and the 1935 amendment which broadened the original statute by further prohibiting marriages between whites or Negroes with members of the Malay race.)

There is no provision in the statute which prohibits Japanese-white, Chinese-white, or Chinese-Negro marriages. Obviously, the marriages prohibited in Maryland were contracted in jurisdictions which have no racial restrictions.

Maryland is 1 of 19 States which have an anti-miscegenation statute, a law prohibiting white-Negro marriages. With the exception of the Union of South Africa, no other country has such a law. The legislation prohibiting the marriage of Malays with white persons or Negroes in Maryland is aimed specifically at Filipinos, who are said to represent many different racial and cultural backgrounds.

Despite this interdiction, resident Filipinos and white women have been intermarrying outside of Maryland with increasing frequency over the past several years. Many of the Filipinos in Baltimore are physicians who have come for postgraduate training in medicine. As for other mixed marriages, white persons and American Indians marry frequently and without any legal restrictions. Also noteworthy are the great numbers of U.S. military personnel who married Chinese, Japanese, and Korean women as well as the numbers of Negro servicemen, particularly those who were stationed in England and Germany, who married white women and subsequently brought their wives to the United States.

This study was undertaken to determine the complete incidence of interracial births in Baltimore from 1950 to 1964 by racial origin, country of birth, ages of parents, occupation of father, and legitimacy status of the child. When an interracial birth occurs in a Baltimore hospital, as did all those reported here, the medical records staff doublechecks to assure the accuracy of the registration…

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Interracial marriages in Maryland

Public Health Reports
Volume 85, Number 8 (August 1970)
pages 739-747

Sidney M. Norton, Director of the Bureau of Vital Records
Baltimore City Health Department, Baltimore, Maryland

Also Lecturer, Department of Chronic Diseases
School of Hygiene and Public Health
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

A Statistical Report

Nullification of all miscegenation legislation in Maryland became effective June 1, 1967, by action of the Maryland General Assembly in September 1966. Laws were repealed(a) penalizing ministers who had united persons of the white and Negro races in marriage and (b) prohibiting marriages between the white and Negro races and members of the Malay race. The State of Maryland took more than 300 years to remove from its statutes the law banning marriages between whites and Negroes—an act the Supreme Court subsequently held had infringed on an individual’s freedom of choice to marry, which should not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations.

Methodology

The data in my report refer to recorded interracial marriages in the State from June 1, 1967, to December 31, 1968. I have emphasized the types of intermarriages occurring most frequently: (a) those between whites and Negroes, (b) between whites and Orientals, and (c) between whites and members of the Malay race.

The following procedures are observed in all marriage license bureaus in the State. Either of the contracting parties may apply for the license. After the couple is sworn in by a clerk of the court, the marriage laws of Maryland are quoted to them, and a series of questions relating to the prospective groom and bride are asked. Their replies are given under oath and entered on the application form for the marriage license by the clerk of the court. The questions include name, residence, age, color, nativity, marital status, and information concerning former marriages, if any.

Criteria used to identify and classify the various races were based on guidelines established for court clerks when issuing marriage licenses to couples of different races. The following racial delineations were contained in a memorandum from a Maryland deputy attorney general to the clerk of the Court of Common Pleas in Baltimore:

• The white race is made up of the Caucasian peoples of the world.
• The Negro race is the black race.
• The yellow race is made up of the Mongolian peoples and includes the Chinese and Japanese.
• The Malay race is the brown race and includes the inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula and Oceania. The Polynesian race is a branch of the Malay race.
• The red race is made up of the American Indians.

The directive also stated that under Maryland law, the following persons may legally intermarry:

• Persons of the white race with persons of the red and yellow races.
• Persons of the yellow race with persons of the white, Malay, red, and Negro races.
• Persons of the Negro race with persons of the red and yellow races.
• Malayans with persons of the red and yellow races.
• Persons of the red race with persons of the white, Negro, Malay, and yellow races.
• Persons of the same race.

The following statutory provisions relate to marriages in Maryland: (a) the minimum age at marriage is 18 years for a man and 16 years for a woman except if the woman is pregnant or has given birth to a child and (b) the clerk of any court in which a marriage is licensed or recorded is required to transmit a report of eachmarriage to the State department of health.

Records of marriages filed with the Maryland State Department of Health during the study period were investigated to ascertain the number and types of interracial marriages and to analyze particular characteristics of grooms and brides (age, marital status, and resident status), political subdivision of the State in which the marriage had taken place, and type of ceremony for each such marriage.

Results

Of the 512 interracial marriages in Maryland from June 1, 1967, through December 31, 1968 (table 1), 310 were between whites and Negroes. Twice as many Negro men and white women intermarried as white men and Negro women. For the first 7 months of the study (June 1 through December 31, 1967), the ratio of Negro men marrying white women, compared with white men marrying Negro women, was 2.6 to 1; in 1968 the proportion was 1.8 to 1.

White-Malay marriages occurred 1.6 times more often between Malay grooms and white brides than between white grooms and Malay brides. The ratio between these two types of unions was slightly higher for the 7-month period in 1967 than in 1968. About an equal number of white men married Oriental women (46) as Oriental men (44) selected white women…

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One Drop of Love: Finding the Love in the One-drop Rule through Documentary Storytelling and Performance

California State University, Los Angeles
May 2013
84 pages

Fanshen DiGiovanni

A Project Report Presented to The Faculties of the Departments of Television, Film & Media Studies, and Music, Theatre & Dance In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Fine Arts

One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for her Father’s Racial Approval is a solo-play incorporating filmed images, photographs and animation to examine how ‘race’ came to be in the United States, and how it influences the relationship between a father and daughter. The show journeys from the 1700s to the present, to cities throughout the United States, and to East and West Africa where both father and daughter spent time in search of their ‘racial’ roots. This project report chronicles and evaluates Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni’s process as a playwright, producer and actor in developing One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for her Father’s Racial Approval.

Room for All

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Monday, 1889-03-04
page 2, column 4
Source: Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Collection
Transcribed and edited by Steven F. Riley

Rev. Dr. Talmage as an Anti Know Nothing.

Rev. Dr. Talmage preached a patriotic sermon yesterday morning. His subject was: “Should America, be Reserved for Americans?” and he answered it in the most anti-Know Nothing style. A very large audience listened. The text was: “And hath made of one blood all nation.” The preacher spoke in part as follows:

I think God built this continent and organized this United States Republic, to demonstrate the stupendous idea of my text. If a Persian stays in Persia he remains Persian, if a Swiss stays in Switzerland he remains a Swiss, if an Austrian stays in Austria he remains an Austrian; but all these and other nationalities coining to America become Americans. This continent is a chemical laboratory where all foreign bloods are to be inextricably mixed, and race antipathies race prejudices are to perish, and this sermon is an ax by which I hope to kill some of them or help to kill some of them.

It is not a difficult thing for me to preach this sermon, because while my ancestors came to this country about two hundred and fifty years ago, some of them came from Wales, and some from Scotland, and some from Holland, and some from other nationalities, so that I feel at home with all people from under the sky and feel a blood relation to all of them. There are madcaps and patriotic lunatics who are ever and anon crying out, “America for Americans! down with the Germans! down with the Irish! down with the Jews! down with the Chinese!” and these vociferations come from many directions, and I propose this morning, as far as possible, to drown them out by the full organ of my text, and to pull out all the stops and put my foot on the pedal that will open the loudest pipes, and run my fingers over all the four banks of ivory keys while I play the chant of my text: “God hath made of one blood all nations.”

There are not five persons in this audience, or in any audience to-day in America—unless it be on an Indian reservation—who did not descend from foreigners, if you go far enough back. The only native Americans are the Modocs and the Mohawks and the Choctaws and the Cherokees and the Seminoles and the Shawnees and such like. If the cry, “America for Americans,” be a Christian and righteous cry, then you and I have no business here, and we had better charter the steamers and the sloops and the yachts and the men of war and get out of this land as quick as possible. If this cry that I abhor had been a successful cry at the start, where now stand our American cities would have stood Indian wigwams, and the Connecticut and the Hudson, instead of being cut with the prow of steamers, would be cut with canoes, and the Mississippi River, instead of being the main artery of this continent would have been only a trough for deer and antelope and wild pigeons to drink out of.

What makes the cry “America for Americans” the more absurd and the more inhuman and the more unchristian is the fact that people who only arrived in this country in their boyhood or only one or two generations back are joining in the cry. Escaped from foreign despotisms themselves, they say: “Now shut the door; don’t let any more escape.” Having got ashore in the lifeboat from the shipwreck, they say: “Now pull up the boat on the beach and let all the rest of the passengers go to the bottom.” And people who have yet the Scotch and the Irish and the English and the Italian brogue are saying: “America for Americans.” How would it be if the native inhabitants of heaven, the angels who were born there, the cherubim and seraphim who have always lived there–should come out on the shore of heaven when you and I at last try to go up, and they should come out and shout to us: “Go back: Heaven for the Heavenians!”

The fact is, that here is a subject which needs to be presented from every American pulpit. Of course, we do not want America to become a convict colony. We would build a wall high as heaven and deep as hell against all foreign thieves, cut throats, pickpockets and Anarchists. We would not allow them even to wipe their feet on the mat of the outside door of Castle Garden. If England and France and Germany and Russia send their vagabonds here because they want to get rid of them, let us put those vagabonds in chains and send them back again to the place whence they came.

But you build a wall at the Narrows, in front of New York Harbor, or at the Golden Gate, in front of San Francisco, to keep out the honest, hard working populations of this world who want to breathe the free air of America, or get a better livelihood for their families, and it is only a question of time when that wall will tumble down on us under the red hot thunderbolts of the Lord God Almighty. They are coming, they will continue to come, and, if I had voice loud enough to be heard across the seas this morning, I would put it to the utmost tension and I would say: “Let them come!” You mean, shriveled up, stingy, blasted soul, seated at your silver dinner plate piled up with bursting roast turkey incarnadined with cranberry, your mouth full and your fork full, cramming down a superabundance that sets your digestive organs into a state of terror, do let some
other nation of the earth have at least a wishing bone.

I believe that some of this cry is an honest cry on the part of people who really fear that America is going to be over-crowded. Now, let me say to all such people: Take the populations’ of the whole earth—all the people of Europe, Asia, Africa and all the islands of the sea—and pour them out on the American continent, and yet there will be room. The Rocky Mountain desert and all the other American barrenesses are to be fertilized, and as Salt Lake City and Utah once could not have raised in many places as much as a spear of grass, they have become the gardens of the world through artificial irrigation, so the time will come when all the barren places on this American continent through artificial irrigation will be brought into a productive state, and, like Illinois’ prairie, wave with wheat fields, or, like Wisconsin farm, rustle with corn tassels. Beside that, after a century or two, when the country gets tolerably well occupied the tide of immigration will set the other way, and the politics and the governmental affairs of other nations; all being made right and Ireland turned into one complete garden, it will invite generations back again, and Russia brought out from, under despotism and made a glorious place to live in, will invite whole generations of Russians back again, and every year there will he hundreds of thousands of Americans going to other continents. And then, the centuries rolling on, after a while all the continents full and crowded, what then?

Some night, a panther meteor wandering through the heavens will put its paw on the world and stop it. Then putting its panther teeth into the neck of the mountain ranges, it will take our world and shake it lifeless, as easily as a rat terrier a rat. I have as much fear that the porpoises in the Atlantic Ocean will multiply until they stop the shipping as I have fear that this country will ever be too much crowded. By the addition of a foreign population to our native population and the intermingling of races on this continent there is going after a while to be a race in 95 per cent, better, stronger, mightier than any race now on the earth, on either side of the Atlantic. Intermarriage of families, intermarriage of nations is depressing, crippling. Marriage outside of one’s nationality, and especially marriage into a style of nationality entirely different from your own is a mighty gain. What makes the Scotch-Irish blood second in pedigree to none because of its brain and stamina of character? It is because the two most unlike people in the world are a Scotchman and an Irishman. Those nationalities intermingle and have the Scotch-Irish blood, and then they go right up to the Supreme Court bench, and right to the front or all merchandise and all jurisprudence.

Nothing so accelerates the human race as the mingling of races. And in this country we are going to have all the opposite nationalities intermingled. It is the intermingling of the races in America that is going to destroy the last vestige of race prejudice. How heaven feels about it you may conclude from the fact that Christ, a Jew and born of a Jewess, promulgated a religion for all races, and that Paul, a Jew, became the chief apostle to the Gentiles, and that Christ has allowed to burst upon us in splendor in this very year the charity of Mr. Hirsch, the Jew, who, after giving $10,000,000 to Christian charities and hospitals in January gave $40,000,000 for schools to educate the Jews in France, Germany and Russia, and, as he says, to extinguish race prejudice. Those $50,000,000 given to the Christians and the Jews for alleviating and educational purposes, not bestowed in a last will and testament when a man must give up his money anyhow, but at 55 years of age and in good health—a magnificence of benevolence never equated since the world was created.

I confess that I used to have some race prejudices, but, thank God, they have all gone, and if I sat to-day in this church, and on one side of me sat a black man, and on the other side of me sat an Indian, and before me sat a Chinaman, and behind me sat a Turk, I would be just as happy as I am now standing in the presence of this brilliant assemblage, and I am about as happy now as I can be and live. Oh it will be healthy for this American atmosphere, healthy for American life when we can take this miserable corpse of race prejudice and bury it. Bring all your spades now and let us dig a grave. Dig it deep down, deeper down, deeper down until we come to the very heart of the earth, half way across China, but no further lest the poison get out on the other side of the world. Then let down this accursed carcass of race prejudice into this deep grave. Then put on the top of it all the mean things that have ever been said about Jew and Gentile, between Turk and Russian, between English and French, between Mongolian and anti Mongolian. Then let us have for a tombstone a scorched and jagged chunk of scoria spit out by some volcanic eruption and chisel on it this epitaph: “Here lies one who cursed the centuries, aged nearly 6.000 years. Departed this life for the perdition from whence it came. No peace to its ashes.”

Film Review: Multiracial Identity

Teaching Sociology
Volume 41, Number 4 (October 2013)
pages 397-399
DOI: 10.1177/0092055X13496205

Sara McDonough
Department of Sociology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

David L. Brunsma, Professor of Sociology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Multiracial Identity. 77 minutes. 2010. Brian Chinhema , director. Bullfrog Films. PO Box 149, Oley, PA 19547. 610.779.8226. http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/.

Released in 2011, Multiracial Identity is a timely, well-crafted film written and directed by Brian Chinhema that presents many of the key concepts, debates, and questions surrounding mixed-race identity and multiraciality in American society. Narrated by Dieter Weber, the film integrates both scholarly and nonscholarly voices to present a number of key discussions and tensions about the place and recognition of multiracial people in U.S. society while also providing space for multiracial individuals or the parents of mixed-race children to talk about their experiences and insights on the meanings of multiraciality in the United States. Featuring prominent scholars in the field of multiracial identity, such as Rainier Spencer and Naomi Zack, as well as Aaron Gullickson and Aliya Saperstein, the film provides some basic historical background to contextualize contemporary discussions about multiraciality. While the numbers show an increase of 33 percent in the multiracial population between 2000 and 2010, the existence of multiracial people is not a new phenomenon. The film sets the historical and conceptual stage early, so students might ask, “What has changed in terms of (multi)race and (multi)racial identity in the United States?”

Viewers are provided with an introductory overview of the existence, status, and sociocultural dilemmas that have faced multiracial populations historically. The film does a good job showing the changing meaning of multiraciality across time and space (e.g., regional differences and across racial/ethnic combinations). Though the historically central organizing principle of the black/white binary is discussed, the film raises the question of the utility of this paradigm for understanding multiraciality as it gives attention to the experience of other multiracial individuals (e.g., Hapa-Haoles/Asian-white). Interfacing with the changing demographics associated with the repeal of certain anti-immigration laws in the 1960s, and the increase in Asian and Hispanic/Latino migration in particular, the film more than adequately …

Read or purchase the review here.

An Inconvenient Truth: “Hispanic” is an ethnic origin, not a “race”

National Institute for Latino Policy, Inc.
2013-08-24

Nancy López, Guest Commentator and Associate Professor of Sociology
University of New Mexico

Kenneth Prewitt’s provocative August 21st New York Times commentary calls us to “fix the census archaic racial categories.” He contends that the current national statistical system is untenable because it has not kept pace with post-1965 demographic shifts. However, it is puzzling that while Dr. Prewitt chides the Census for conflating race and nationality, he proceeds to do just that.

His solution is to ask two new questions: “One based on a streamlined version of today’s ethnic and racial categories/’ and a second, separate comprehensive nationality question. This recommendation would effectively conflate race with ethnic origin as if these were one and the same thing. But the inconvenient truth is that knowing a person’s ethnicity, (for example, their cultural background, nationality or ancestry), tells you nothing about their race or their social position in society that is usually related to the meanings assigned to a conglomeration of one’s physical traits, including skin color and facial features.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Dr. Prewitt’s recommendation for a streamlined version of today’s ethnic and racial categories is his proposal to make Hispanics a “race.” He points to the fact that 37% of Hispanics marked “some other race” in the 2010 Census race question as proof that the question is flawed. But could it be that it is that many Hispanics or Latinos occupy an in-between racial status that precludes them from being readily identified as white, black, Asian or Native American in the U.S. context?…

Read the entire article here.