Mixed Race Studies

“I Don’t See Color” Personal and Critical Perspectives on White Privilege

Pennsylvania State University Press
2015
280 pages
6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-06499-4

Edited by:

Bettina Bergo, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada

Tracey Nicholls, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Lewis University, Romeoville, Illinois

Who is white, and why should we care? There was a time when the immigrants of New York City’s Lower East Side—the Irish, the Poles, the Italians, the Russian Jews—were not white, but now “they” are. There was a time when the French-speaking working classes of Quebec were told to “speak white,” that is, to speak English. Whiteness is an allegorical category before it is demographic.

This volume gathers together some of the most influential scholars of privilege and marginalization in philosophy, sociology, economics, psychology, literature, and history to examine the idea of whiteness. Drawing from their diverse racial backgrounds and national origins, these scholars weave their theoretical insights into essays critically informed by personal narrative. This approach, known as “braided narrative,” animates the work of award-winning author Eula Biss. Moved by Biss’s fresh and incisive analysis, the editors have assembled some of the most creative voices in this dialogue, coming together across the disciplines.

Along with the editors, the contributors are Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Nyla R. Branscombe, Drucilla Cornell, Lewis R. Gordon, Paget Henry, Ernest-Marie Mbonda, Peggy McIntosh, Mark McMorris, Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Victor Ray, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Louise Seamster, Tracie L. Stewart, George Yancy, and Heidi A. Zetzer.

Table Contents

• Preface / Eula Biss
• Introduction / Bettina Bergo and Tracey Nicholls
• Part I. What is White Privilege?
  • Chapter 1: Deprivileging Philosophy / Peggy McIntosh
  • Chapter 2: White Privilege and the Problem with Affirmative Action / Lewis R. Gordon
  • Chapter 3: Revisioning “White Privilege” / Marilyn Nissim-Sabat
• Part II. The Images and Rhetoric of White Privilege
  • Chapter 4: The Very Image of Privilege: Film Creation of White Transcendentals in Vienna and Hollywood / Bettina Bergo
  • Chapter 5: Painting and Negotiating Colors / Lilia Moritz Schwarcz
  • Chapter 6: I Was an Honorary White Man: Reflections on Space, Place, and Origin / Mark McMorris
• Part III. Troubling Privilege
  • Chapter 7: Whiteness as Insidious: On the Embedded and Opaque White Racist Self / George Yancy
  • Chapter 8: White Privilege: The Luxury of Undivided Attention / Heidi A. Zetzer
  • Chapter 9: The Costs of Privilege and Dividends of Privilege Awareness: The Social Psychology of Confronting Inequality / Tracie L. Stewart and Nyla R. Branscombe
  • Chapter 10: Unpacking the Imperialist Knapsack: White Privilege and Imperialism in Obama’s America / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Victor Ray, and Louise Seamster
• Part IV. Other Perspectives on White and Western Privilege
  • Chapter 11: Whiteness and Africana Political Economy / Paget Henry
  • Chapter 12: The Great White North: Failing Muslim-Canadians – Failing Us All / Tracey Nicholls
  • Chapter 13: Rethinking Ethical Feminism through uBuntu / Drucilla Cornell
  • Chapter 14: The Afrocentrist Critique of Eurocentrism: The Decolonization of Knowledge /Ernest-Marie Mbonda
• Contributor Biographies

Once sidelined, Taiwan’s mixed-race children find new embrace

Christian Science Monitor
2015-07-01

Ralph Jennings

As more Taiwanese men marry Southeast Asian women, the island nation is beginning to think of itself as multi-ethnic, in a distinct departure from the mainland. The change is supported by younger generations.

Taipei — Huang Hui-mei used to dread being asked about her racial heritage. The daughter of a Vietnamese mother and Taiwanese father, she knew that having Southeast Asian heritage was seen as a marker of low status in Taiwan.

But now, Hui-mei, a high school sophomore whose mother was driven by poverty to come to Taiwan, is finding that people are more curious – in a good way – about her background.

Taiwanese are increasingly thinking of themselves as a multi-ethnic society – a concept that is reshaping Taiwan’s story of its basic identity. That has larger significance now as a generation of younger Taiwanese move to more clearly distinguish their island and its culture from that of political rival, China…

Read the entire article here.

Taken Identity

The UC Santa Barbara Current
Santa Barbara, California
2015-12-21

Jim Logan

A new book by a UC Santa Barbara historian traces the bright and fuzzy lines of race in America

The United States’ long record on race is, shall we say, checkered. Even in a time when an African-American sits in the White House and mixed-race families are common, issues of race and identity still roil the national conversation. How do we make sense of this seeming contradiction?

Paul Spickard, a UC Santa Barbara historian and one of the country’s foremost scholars of race, has some ideas on the matter. In his new book, “Race in Mind: Critical Essays” (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), Spickard tackles a range of issues, including racial categories, identity, multiethnicity, Whiteness studies and more. In 14 essays that span more than 20 years of scholarship, he dissects the history of race as a social construct and assesses the present and future of race in America with insight and wit…

…Spickard doesn’t just study race, he’s lived with and observed its peculiarities his whole life. Growing up in inner-city Seattle, his high school was roughly 60 percent black and 30 percent Asian. He calls it “the accident of where I grew up. Except for family members and two friends in high school, I had never had a five-minute conversation with a white person in my life until I went away to college. Racial questions are kind of the questions of my life.” His two adult children are half Chinese American. Both identify as mixed, but one lives in an entirely Chinese American social world and the other a mostly white one…

Read the entire article here.

Black in a Foreign Land: In Defense of Dominican Identity

The Huffington Post
2015-12-17

César Vargas

I was born and raised in the Dominican Republic until I was two months shy of turning 13. The Dominican Republic has a peculiar color metric system–not necessarily on race. So it should go without saying that I wasn’t exposed to the clear cut Americentric, and very binary, concept of race in America until I set foot in the United States.

Since a very young age, I was aware of how both colorism and classism were prevalent back in the island. I noticed how people were treated and often saw how the socioeconomic standing of an individual trumped their color–up to a point if we’re to test folks by the brown paper bag. I’ve said once or twice that a Black man with money is more white than a white poor man. In a third world country where the majority of people are mulattoes, and most of the darker population would be of Haitian descent, you’d be hard pressed not to find people of most shades within families. Some of those family members were better off than others, and often, I’ve found, they could be of any shade.

Of course, like any nation of the world colonized by Europeans, power and wealth is usually concentrated with their descendants, but it would be dishonest to say that most of the power and wealth in the Dominican Republic is owned and controlled solely by its small white population. There are people of color (and visibly so), in most power and entertainment structures. A lot more, I dare say, than most Latin American countries. If we go by the one drop rule, there have been Black public figures, Black businesspeople, Black athletes, Black entertainers, Black generals, Black presidents, and so on. If you put them next to most African Americans, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference…

Read the entire article here.

Making Blackness, Making Policy

Harvard University
2012
178 pages

Peter Geller

Doctoral Dissertation

Too often the acknowledgment that race is a social construction ignores exactly how this construction occurs. By illuminating the way in which the category of blackness and black individuals are made, we can better see how race matters in America. Antidiscrimination policy, social science research, and the state’s support of its citizens can all be improved by an accurate and concrete definition of blackness.

Making Blackness, Making Policy argues that blackness and black people are literally made rather than discovered. The social construction of blackness involves the naming of individuals as black, and the subsequent interaction between this naming and racial projects. The process of naming involves an intersubjective dialogue in which racial self-identification and ascription by others lead to a consensus on an individual’s race. These third parties include an individual’s community, the media, and, crucially, the state. Following Ian Hacking, this process is most properly termed the dynamic nominalism of blackness.

My dissertation uses analytic philosophy, qualitative and quantitative research, and historical analysis to defend this conception. The dynamic nominalist process is illustrated through the media’s contribution to the making of Barack Obama’s blackness, and the state’s creation and maintenance of racial categories through law, policy, and enumeration.

I then argue that the state’s dominant role in creating blackness, and the vital role that a black identity plays in millions’ sense of self, requires the United States Government to support a politics of recognition. The state’s antidiscrimination efforts would also improve through the adoption of a dynamic nominalism of blackness. Replacing the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission’s inconsistent and contradictory definitions of race with the dynamic nominalism of blackness would clarify when and how racial discrimination occurs.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Making Blackness Across Disciplines
• Chapter One: The Dynamic Nominalism of Blackness
• Chapter Two: Barack Obama and the Making of Black People
• Chapter Three: The State and the Centrality of Black Identity
• Chapter Four: Definitions of Race and Antidiscrimination Policy
• Conclusion: Making Use of Making Blackness
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Race in Mind: Critical Essays

University of Notre Dame Press
2015
408 pages
ISBN: 978-0-268-04148-9

Paul Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

With contributions by Jeffrey Moniz and Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly

Race in Mind presents fourteen critical essays on race and mixed race by one of America’s most prolific and influential ethnic studies scholars. Collected in one volume are all of Paul Spickard’s theoretical writings over the past two decades. Ten of the articles have been revised and updated from previous publications. Four appear here for the first time. Spickard’s work embraces three overarching themes: race as biology versus race as something constructed by social and political relationships; race as a phenomenon that exists not just in the United States, but in every part of the world, and even in the relationships between nations; and the question of racial multiplicity.

These essays analyze how race affects people’s lives and relationships in all settings, from the United States to Great Britain and from Hawaiʻi to Chinese Central Asia. They contemplate the racial positions in various societies of people called Black and people called White, of Asians and Pacific Islanders, and especially of those people whose racial ancestries and identifications are multiple. Here for the first time are Spickard’s trenchant analyses of the creation of race in the South Pacific, of DNA testing for racial ancestry, and of the meaning of multiplicity in the age of Barack Obama.

White Latino Racism on the Rise: It’s Time for a Serious Conversation on Euro-Diasporic Whiteness

Latino Rebels
2015-12-21

Wiliam Garcia

A common misconnection that exists today rests on the notion that there are no racial hierarchies in Latin American countries or within the Latino communities in the United States. In other words, Latino (or Hispanic) is itself a race. For many, this conversation is a pointless squabble that halts the true need for unity amongst marginalized groups in the United States. Unfortunately, overlooking the importance of this issue has in fact delineated separation and a lack of interest in each other’s problems.

The shooting of unarmed African-American teenager Trayvon Martin by a half-Peruvian and half-White man named George Zimmerman, the rise of so-called Hispanic conservatives like Ted Cruz, Al Cardenas and Marco Rubio, and the examples of racist comments by Latinos in the media like Rodner Figueroa, have made it impossible to have a conversation of Latinos and race. It is becoming clear that Whites from Latin America, although marginalized by Anglo-Whites, have been able to pass as honorary Whites and benefit from the inequalities formed by White Supremacy. This is not new, and it has a history.

Many people who neglect to explore the history of Latin Americans in the United Sates fail to analyze people like the famous white Cuban Ricky Ricardo (Desi Arnaz), who penetrated the American television series “I Love Lucy” (1951) at a time when Black people were not even allowed to perform next to White actors. Lucy (Lucille Ball) was Arnaz’ real wife, and both enjoyed a long and prosperous career in the film industry. In 1954 Arnaz was even able to get a role as the famous Don Juan…

…While many invoke the idea of mestizaje (racial mixing) and the one-drop rule, it did not determine Latin American identity racially. The false idea that you were non-White if any of your ancestors was not White has been a common belief that undergirded racial categories and Whiteness as passing in the United States. Regardless if Arnaz was considered White or not, his Whiteness allowed him to pass and have access to Hollywood. Arnaz benefited from the system of White Supremacy. While Arnaz was able to remain Cuban (while also being marginalized), Hernández was not able to be Puerto Rican because he was Black…

Read the entire article here.

Panel Discussion: Social Inequalities in Health

National Institutes of Health (U.S.). Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research
Bethesda, Maryland
2015-05-08, 14:00 EDT (Local Time)

The NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research will host the Panel Discussion: Social Inequalities in Health, on May 8, 2015, at the NIH Campus, as part of the 2014-2015 BSSR Lecture Series to promote open and engaged discussion about cutting edge research in the behavioral and social sciences field.

Panelists:

• Ann Morning, PhD, New York University
• Dorothy Roberts, JD, University of Pennsylvania
• Jo Phelan, PhD, Columbia University

Watch or download the video (01:56:15) here.

National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America

Oxford University Press
2014-07-07
400 pages
22 b/w line illus., 4 b/w halftones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199337354
Paperback ISBN: 9780199337361

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

• The first comprehensive history of census-taking and nation-making in nineteen Latin American states across nearly two centuries.
• Argues that the relationship of individual states to the international system of states plays a decisive role in shaping how states classify and count citizens on their censuses.

The era of official color-blindness in Latin America has come to an end. For the first time in decades, nearly every state in Latin America now asks their citizens to identify their race or ethnicity on the national census. Most observers approvingly highlight the historic novelty of these reforms, but National Colors shows that official racial classification of citizens has a long history in Latin America.

Through a comprehensive analysis of the politics and practice of official ethnoracial classification in the censuses of nineteen Latin American states across nearly two centuries, this book explains why most Latin American states classified their citizens by race on early national censuses, why they stopped the practice of official racial classification around mid-twentieth century, and why they reintroduced ethnoracial classification on national censuses at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Beyond domestic political struggles, the analysis reveals that the ways that Latin American states classified their populations from the mid-nineteenth century onward responded to changes in international criteria for how to construct a modern nation and promote national development. As prevailing international understandings of what made a political and cultural community a modern nation changed, so too did the ways that Latin American census officials depicted diversity within national populations. The way census officials described populations in official statistics, in turn, shaped how policymakers viewed national populations and informed their prescriptions for national development–with consequences that still reverberate in contemporary political struggles for recognition, rights, and redress for ethnoracially marginalized populations in today’s Latin America.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Ethnoracial Classification and the State
• 2. Classifying Colonial Subjects
• 3. Enumerating Nations
• 4. The Race to Progress
• 5. Constructing Natural Orders
• 6. From Race to Culture
• 7. We All Count
• 8. Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index

The Racialization of Legal Categories in the First U.S. Census

Social Science History
Volume 39, Number 4, Winter 2015
pages 485-519

Rebecca Jean Emigh, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Los Angeles

Dylan Riley, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

Patricia Ahmed
South Dakota State University

This paper examines the demographic categories in the first few US censuses, which are asymmetrical combinations of race and legal status not mandated by the US Constitution. State actors explicitly introduced and revised these categories; however, these state actors successfully introduced these categories into the census only when they were already widespread throughout society. Thus, more generally, the paper points to flaws in a “state-centered” view of information gathering, which stresses how state actors create census categories that, in turn, shape social conditions as they become subsequently widespread. In contrast, this paper suggests that politicians draw on widespread social categories when creating census categories, showing how state and social influences interact to create the information in censuses.

Read or purchase the article here.