Mixed Race Studies

Historicizing “mixed-race” and post-modern amnesia

O Desafio da Diferença (Challenge of the Difference)
Universidade Federal da Bahia
Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
2000-04-09 through 2000-04-12

Grupo de Trabalho (Workshop) 5: Mixing it up with Mixed Race: Problematizing and Historicizing the Mixed Race Discourse

Katya Gibel Azoulay [Mevorach], Associate Professor of Anthropology
Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa

Americans have carried the problem of the color line into the 21st century but it is doubtful that the generation of W.E.B. Du Bois anticipated the emergence of a “multiracial” movement whose primary objective was to gain recognition of mixed-race people as a unique entity and different collective. This phenomenon is an outgrowth of “interracial” marriages which, according to the U.S. Census, indicate dramatic increases since the dismantlement of state anti-miscegenation laws in 1967. Blacks, however, are “noticeably absent” from this trend and Newsweek has estimated that approximately 20 percent of interracial marriages were between black and white partners and the overwhelming majority of these are between white women and black men [Fletcher 1998; Azoulay 1997:95]

This paper focuses on the demand for a multiracial category in the U.S. Census in order to explore two intersecting aspects of the multiracial discourse. Attention is only given to the black/white binary for it is this angle which is the most contentious and has received the most public attention. On the one hand, the idea of multiracialism eclipses the broader issue of power partially because it is premised on privileging individual rights rather than group rights. On the other hand, the celebration of multiracial people may be read as a postmodern script in which women, as mothers, occupy a central role in the formation and politicization of racial identities.

As a departure point, let us address the premise of the question posed by the multiracial movement: should racial classifications used to track broad demographic trends and monitor compliance with legislation against racial discrimination take each individual heritage into account? I suggest that the demand for a multiracial category confuses personal identities with prescriptive identities while ignoring the relationship between public policy and identifiable communities. Public policies that utilize race categories affect groups of people who may or may not subscribe to a shared collective identity but who are nevertheless perceived as a group. Government and institutional policies shaped by information gathered about social categories are not formulated for individuals but for groups. The political implications of this lead opponents and supporters of government sponsored social engineering to invoke the equal protection clause under the 14th amendment with very different interpretations. In a departure from the direction set by the U.S. Supreme Court 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education toward civil rights legislation, the courts have moved away from protecting historically disadvantaged group rights evidenced by court-ordered repeals of affirmative action policies confusing invidious discrimination with remedial racial preference.

As a preface, let me state clearly my position: race categories are public fictions which are deeply embedded in American ways of thinking and acting. Furthermore, because classifications based on the political and social category of “race” have no scientific basis, they are misused when appropriated as biological criteria into medical research in the United States [Tapper 1999]. Consequently, arguments for a multiracial category for health reasons (such as bone marrow donors) rely on a faulty notion that race categories can be adjusted for accuracy. Nevertheless, race has assumed the status of a social fact whose meanings reflect, and are reflected by, the cognitive feel of lived experience in a race-based society [Piper 1992; Scales-Trent 1995].

Read the entire paper here.

Census report shows multiracial and minority population growing fastest

PoliticsNation with Rev. Al Sharpton
NBC News
2013-06-13

Morgan Whitaker, Producer

As white birth rates declined, Asian-American and Hispanic populations grew significantly, but the latest Census Report shows that multiracial populations grew fastest.

America’s young children are more racially diverse than ever before, according to a Census report released Thursday morning, which finds that approximately half of all children under five are racial minorities.

Additionally, the fastest percentage of population growth is among self-identified multiracial Americans—especially fascinating in a time when ads featuring interracial families still spark controversy…

Read the entire article here.

Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning?

The New York Times
2013-07-06

Shaila Dewan, Economics Reporter

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As a racial classification, the term Caucasian has many flaws, dating as it does from a time when the study of race was based on skull measurements and travel diaries. It has long been entirely unmoored from its geographical reference point, the Caucasus region. Its equivalents from that era are obsolete — nobody refers to Asians as “Mongolian” or blacks as “Negroid.”

And yet, there it was in the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. The plaintiff, noted Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in his majority opinion, was Caucasian.

To me, having covered the South for many years, the term seems like one of those polite euphemisms that hides more than it reveals. There is no legal reason to use it. It rarely appears in federal statutes, and the Census Bureau has never put a checkbox by the word Caucasian. (White is an option.)…

…The use of Caucasian to mean white was popularized in the late 18th century by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German anthropologist, who decreed that it encompassed Europeans and the inhabitants of a region reaching from the Obi River in Russia to the Ganges to the Caspian Sea, plus northern Africans. He chose it because the Caucasus was home to “the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgians,” and because among his collection of 245 human skulls, the Georgian one was his favorite wrote Nell Irvin Painter, a historian who explored the term’s origins in her book “The History of White People.”…

…Susan Glisson, who as the executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in Oxford, Miss., regularly witnesses Southerners sorting through their racial vocabulary, said she rarely hears “Caucasian.” “Most of the folks who work in this field know that it’s a completely ridiculous term to assign to whites,” she said. “I think it’s a term of last resort for people who are really uncomfortable talking about race. They use the term that’s going to make them be as distant from it as possible.”

There is another reason to use it, said Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government and African-American studies at Harvard. “The court, or some clever clerk, doesn’t really want to use the word white in part because roughly half of Hispanics consider themselves white.” She added, “White turns out to be a much more ambiguous term now than we used to think it was.”

There are a number of terms that refer to various degrees of blackness, both current and out of favor: African-American, mulatto, Negro, colored, octaroon. There are not a lot of options for whites. In Texas, they say Anglo. And there is the pejorative we were so pithily reminded of when a witness in the racially charged George Zimmerman trial said the victim, Trayvon Martin, had called Mr. Zimmerman a “creepy-ass cracker.”…

Read the entire article here.

Redefining la raza

U.S. Catholic
2011-07-06

Father Tom Joyce, CMF

There use to be an unspoken pattern to Hispanic migration to the United States: Mexicans drifted to Los Angeles or South Texas, Puerto Ricans—soon followed by Dominicans—to New York City. Cubans stayed in Miami for a quick return to Havana that never came. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans shared Chicago—Mexicans on the Southwest side and Puerto Ricans on the Northwest. Over the years Central Americans drifted into Florida and the nation’s capital, and Mexicans followed meatpacking into the plains states.

The recent plague of xenophobic nastiness in state laws aren’t confined to Arizona and Utah, who have long known Hispanics, but are now popping up in Georgia, Indiana, and Alabama. The latest census confirms the spread of the 50 million-plus Latino population across the entire nation. Our largest minority, they are now on the way to being the majority in the latter part of the 21st century, according to projections.

But a funny thing is happening on the way to that majority: It’s getting more diverse every day. The most recent census gave respondents more choice when selecting their racial identity—mostly to accommodate the growing number of mixed race individuals. We have long had black Hispanics—look at any major league baseball team—and they have usually identified as Hispanics first. They are unmindful of color or that racial prejudice has a long nasty history in their homelands.

The result of the 2010 census of New York City has added another twist to those identifying as Latino or Hispanic. Out of the 57,000 who identified themselves as American Indian in New York City, 40,000 were Latino from Mexico; the rest were from Latin America. Even families long established in the United States check American Indian and Hispanic on their census forms…

Read the entire article here.

Of Loving and Zimmerman

Univision Communications, Inc.
2013-06-26

Carlos Cortés, Professor Emeritus of History
University of California, Riverside

In my last blog I addressed the question of Latino identity by examining the controversy in “Is the New Pope Latino?” I responded with an emphatic “yes” (in about 500 words). Since then, three separate items relating to Latino identity have caught my eye.

First was the Census Bureau’s report that, between 2010 and 2012, the number of multiracial Americans grew faster (6.6%) than any other racial category. That figure does not include marriages between Latinos and non-Latinos, as the federal government correctly classifies us as an ethnic group, not as a race.

Second was the start of the Florida murder trial of George Zimmerman for the February 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin. Current articles often explicitly identify Zimmerman as Hispanic. Indeed, he is of mixed ancestry—his mother is Peruvian.

Third, June marked the 46th anniversary of the game-changing Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision, which voided state-level anti-miscegenation laws. That decision has given rise to the boom in interracial marriages (now around 15% annually). It also contributed to the recent outpouring of public support for General Mills when it was criticized by some for featuring a biracial family in one of its Cheerios commercials.

As an ethnic group with a long tradition of intermarriage stretching back to our Latin American roots, Hispanics have been way ahead of the U.S. curve.  According to some estimates, by the third generation more than half of U.S. Latinos outmarry—that is, marry someone who is not Latino.

This raises two critical questions: How do children of such intermarriages identify ethnically? How are they identified by others?…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Where in the World Is Juan—and What Color Is He?: The Geography of Latina/o Racial Identity in Southern California

American Quarterly
Volume 65, Number 2, June 2013
pages 309-341
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2013.0020

Laura Pulido, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity
University of Southern California

Manuel Pastor, Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity
University of Southern California

Recently there Recently there has been a robust discussion on the question of Latina/o racial subjectivity, particularly whether Latinas/os are more apt to identify as “white” or as people of color. Scholars focused on contemporary identification patterns have examined key variables, including age, education, income, and nativity in an effort to understand Latinas/os’ racial choices. However, dimensions of time and space are frequently unanalyzed. Focusing on the seven-county region of Southern California—home to the United States’ largest concentration of Latinas/os—we use the American Community Survey (2008-10) to consider a range of variables, including spatial and temporal characteristics, to better understand Latina/o, especially Mexican American, racial subjectivity. Focusing on Latinas/os who identify as either “white” or “some other race” and utilizing a regression analysis to isolate the relative impact of each variable, we find that Latinas/os who live in more segregated neighborhoods as well as those who live among a high proportion of Latinas/os, are more likely to identify as “some other race.”

In 1980. for the first time, the US Census Bureau broadly allowed respondents to identity themselves as Latinas/os or Hispanics, in addition to designating their “race.” To the surprise of some, 38 percent of the newly minted Latinas/os rejected the usual race categories, marking “some other race” (SOR) rather than white, black. Asian, or Native American. Thinking that matters might change as respondents became accustomed to the forms. Census authorities grew more concerned when in 1990 43 percent of Latinas/os marked SOR. Believing that the issue might be related to question sequencing—respondents were asked to identify race first, then Hispanicity—the sequence of the questions was reversed in 2000. The logic of the Census Bureau: perhaps once respondents were able to mark the Latina/o identification, they would then be more willing to mark a standard racial category as requested. That year, the percentage of Latinas/os marking SOR stayed relatively steady at 42 percent, with an additional 6 percent choosing a new multirace category. Looked at another way. the share marking “white” fell from 52 percent to 48 percent between 1990 and 2000.

The popularity of the SOR designation should not have been a surprise to Census bureaucrats: Latinas/os, especially ethnic Mexicans, have long been seen as nonwhite in the popular and political imagination, and since the Chicana/o movement many have embraced a nonwhite identity. At the same time, Latinas/os racial subjectivity has attracted considerable scholarly attention over the last decade, including examinations of how “whiteness” may be open to peoples who were previously considered nonwhite (including Asians and Latinas/os), how the multiracial experience affects racial and color identification, and how racial subjectivity is contested within families and communities that seem, at first glance, to be racially similar.  While obviously a matter of academic interest, racial subjectivity also has significant political consequences. Since Latinas/os became the largest “racial minority” in 2000. scholars and activists alike are grappling with how Latinas/os will intersect with the existing…

Black/Non-Black Divide and The Anti-Blackness of Non-Black Minorities

Still Furious and Brave: Who’s Afraid of Persistent Blackness?
2013-04-03

Robert Reece
Department of Sociology
Duke University

Last week, an Asian-American fraternity at the University of California Irvine posted a parody of a music video featuring one of their members in blackface. Blackface has become the go-to type of public racism for many types of white people across the political spectrum, and the internet is overflowing with analyses of why it’s racist so I won’t bother with that here. My concern is that an Asian-American fraternity is the culprit this time and what that may mean as we enter an era where our racial boundaries may be shifting as dramatically as the racial demographics.

I’m certainly not surprised that an Asian-American fraternity harbors racial stereotypes, both about themselves and other minorities. White supremacy is partially rule by consent, with subordinate groups believing in their own pathology (I’m looking at you Bill Cosby), but I think this incident, in this moment, deserves much more attention.

Proclamations by demographers about the coming white minority are used by both liberals and conservatives to promise inevitable political change. Liberals discuss how minorities outnumbering whites will signal as intense power shift in politics that will usher in an unprecedented age of progress and liberalism, and conservatives fear that they will lose their country to the brown hoards resting just over the horizon. But sociologist George Yancey, in Who is White?, questions the very demographers claiming that a white minority is certain. Yancey argues that demographers cannot account for shifting racial boundaries when making their predictions. So while their raw numbers may be correct, their racial predictions are probably incorrect because racial categories are always changing…

…This is the phenomenon at play when an Asian American fraternity implicitly approves of an act of anti-black racism. And this isn’t an isolated incident of negative black attitudes. In Racism Without Racists, sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva presents survey results showing that Asian American political attitudes, including those regarding stereotypes of blacks, are very similar to those of whites. On some items, Asian Americans even demonstrated stronger anti-black attitudes than whites. In this way, they are following in the footsteps of other formerly marginalized groups who demonized blackness on their way to whiteness.

In The Wages of Whiteness, historian David Roediger chronicles how the newly immigrated Irish of the 19^th century made a strategic decision to pit themselves against blacks despite their acknowledgement of a common oppressor. They essentially built their case for inclusion into whiteness on the back of their anti-black attitudes. Anti-black racism was the glue that bound white ethnics to whiteness, and it may serve a similar purpose as our current racial project progresses. In the case of the Irish, their attitudes eventually manifested in an emulation of whiteness, in committing mob violence against blacks. But in 2013, popular violence against blacks doesn’t come in the form of gruesome beatings in the streets (police brutality notwithstanding); it comes in the form of YouTube videos of fraternity boys in blackface that, just like the mob violence of the 19^th century, goes unpunished by authorities.

Read the entire article here.

A Nation of Mutts

The New York Times
2013-06-28

David Brooks

Over the past few decades, American society has been transformed in a fit of absence of mind. First, we’ve gone from a low immigrant nation to a high immigrant nation. If you grew up between 1950 and 1985, you grew up at a time when only about 5 percent or 6 percent of American residents were foreign born. Today, roughly 13 percent of American residents are foreign born, and we’re possibly heading to 15 percent.

Moreover, up until now, America was primarily an outpost of European civilization. Between 1830 and 1880, 80 percent of the immigrants came from Northern and Western Europe. Over the following decades, the bulk came from Southern and Central Europe. In 1960, 75 percent of the foreign-born population came from Europe, with European ideas and European heritage.

Soon, we will no longer be an outpost of Europe, but a nation of mutts, a nation with hundreds of fluid ethnicities from around the world, intermarrying and intermingling. Americans of European descent are already a minority among 5-year-olds. European-Americans will be a minority over all in 30 years at the latest, and probably sooner…

…Soon there will be no dominant block, just complex networks of fluid streams — Vietnamese, Bengalis, Kazakhs. It’s a bit like the end of the cold war when bipolar thinking had to give way to a radically multipolar mind-set.

Because high immigration is taking place at a time of unprecedentedly low ethnic hostility, we’re seeing high rates of intermarriage. This creates large numbers of hybrid individuals, biracial or triracial people with names like Enrique Cohen-Chan. These people transcend existing categories and soften the social boundaries between groups.

This won’t lead to a bland mélange America but probably a move to ethnic re-orthodoxy. As Alvaro Vargas Llosa points out in his book, “Global Crossings,” the typical pattern is that the more third-generation people assimilate, the more they also value their ethnic roots. We could soon see people with completely unaccented English joining Chinese-American Federations and Honduran-American Support Networks…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

New Faces, Old Faces: Counting the Multiracial Population Past and Present

Ann Morning, Associate Professor of Sociology
New York University

Chapter in:

New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century
SAGE Publications, Inc.
Paperback ISBN: 9780761923008
2002
432 pages

Edited by:

Loretta I. Winters
California State University, Northridge

Herman L. DeBose
California State University, Northridge

Multiracial Americans have often been heralded as “new people” and in fact have been rediscovered as such more than once in the last century. Charles Chesnutt’s 1899 novel The House Behind the Cedars features a mulatto character who uses the phrase to describe himself and others like him; in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, “the new Negro” described a people that was “neither African nor European, but both” (Williamson, 1980, p. 3). More recently, Forbes (1993) has used the term “Neo-Americans” to denote populations combining African, European, and American Indian roots, and a century after Chesnutt’s work appeared, numerous articles and books—including this volume—convey the sense of multiraciality’s newness in titles such as “Brave New Faces” (Alaya, 2001) or “The New Face of Race” (Meacham, 2000).

Yet having populated North America for nearly four centuries, mixed-race people are far from being a recent phenomenon in the United States. Their early presence has been recorded to greater and lesser degrees in legal records, literature, and historical documentation. As far back as the 1630s and 1640s, colonial records attest to the punishment of interracial sexual unions and the regulation of mulattoes’ slave status (Williamson, 1980). Dictionaries chart 16th-century English usage of the word mulatow (Sollors, 2000), although the meaning of this term has varied over time (Forbes, 1993). Finally, mixed-race people have long populated American literature, particularly since the early 19th century (Sollors, 2000). In sum, the multiracial community is not a new, 20th century phenomenon but rather a long-standing element of American society.

By obscuring the historic dimensions of American multiraciality—emphasizing its newness but not its oldness—we may run the risk of ignoring lessons that past racial stratification offers for understanding today’s outcomes. For one thing, older social norms still make themselves felt in contemporary discussion of mixed-race identity (Davis, 1991; Waters, 1991; Wilson, 1992). In addition, history reminds us that these attitudes toward multiraciality were embedded in complex webs of social, political, economic, and cultural premises and objectives, thereby suggesting that the same holds true today. Finally, turning to the past highlights how malleable racial concepts have proved to be over time despite the permanence and universality we often ascribe to them. Given the United States’ history, the extent to which public attitudes toward mixed-race unions and ancestry have changed is remarkable. Perhaps the real new people today are not just those of multiracial heritage but also Americans in general who now conceptualize, tolerate, or embrace multiple-race identities in ways that were unacceptable in the past.

The history of census enumeration and scientific estimation of the multiracial population in the United States offers an illuminating window onto older conceptions of mixed-race status and a thought-provoking opportunity to compare past treatment of this community with its contemporary reflection. Although the introduction of multiple-race self-description on the 2000 census is often depicted as an entirely new innovation—much as multiracial people themselves are considered to be a new group (Nobles, 2000)—it was not in fact the first time that mixed-race origins have been recorded on the U.S. census. In the 19th century, multiracial response categories were a common, if sporadic, feature of decennial censuses whose appearance and disappearance can be traced to the social, political, and economic outlooks of the nation’s white citizenry at the time. Accordingly, this chapter seeks both to describe historical practices for counting the mixed-race population and to link them with the racial ideologies that motivated and shaped them. Although the focus is on national census enumeration, I also study the efforts of scientists who sought for over a century to estimate the size of the multiracial population and who tended to share the same preoccupations and preconceptions about race as the census officials of their day. Finally, I consider possible implications of the historical record for our understanding of the introduction of multiplerace classification on the 2000 census, suggesting that factors similar to those that weighed in the past are still discernible today…

Read the entire chapter here.

Census Bureau Names Ann Morning to National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations

Newsroom, News Release: CB13-R.30
United States Census Bureau
2013-06-26

Public Information Office, Phone: 301-763-3030

Note from Steven F. Riley: Ann Morning is the author of book The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference (University of California Press, 2011) and the chapter “New Faces, Old Faces: Counting the Multiracial Population Past and Present,” in the book New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century (SAGE, 2002).  To read more of Dr. Morning’s discourses, click here.

The U.S. Census Bureau today announced 10 new members of its National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations, and has named Ann Morning from New York University as a member of the committee.

The National Advisory Committee advises the Census Bureau on a wide range of variables that affect the cost, accuracy and implementation of the Census Bureau’s programs and surveys, including the once-a-decade census. The committee, which is comprised of 32 members from multiple disciplines, advises the Census Bureau on topics such as housing, children, youth, poverty, privacy, race, ethnicity and sexual-orientation issues.

“The committee has helped us meet emerging challenges the Census Bureau faces in producing high-quality statistics about our diverse nation,” said Thomas Mesenbourg, the Census Bureau’s acting director. “By helping us better understand a variety of issues that affect statistical measurement, this committee ensures that the Census Bureau continues to provide relevant and timely statistics used by federal, state and local governments as well as business and industry in an increasingly technologically oriented society.”

The National Advisory Committee members, who serve at the discretion of the Census Bureau director, are chosen to serve based on their expertise and knowledge of the cultural patterns, issues and/or statistical needs of “hard-to-count” populations. The new members will be seated on Aug. 1.

Morning is an associate professor at New York University’s Department of Sociology. She completed her Ph.D. in sociology at Princeton University. Prior to becoming an academic, she worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and as a U.S. Foreign Service officer based in the American Embassy in Honduras. Her research interests are race and ethnicity, especially racial classification; multiracial population; demography; sociology of knowledge and science; immigration; and economic sociology. Morning received the prestigious Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association in 2005 and received a Fulbright scholarship to spend the 2008-09 academic year at the University of Milan-Bicocca.